The future is fucking BLEAK.
Yeah, the news Ive been hearing is banks have been cutting off their digital systems to LLM agents.
Also banks have been quitly offloading debt they undersigned for data center buildout, but that’s a different issue.
Also banks have been quitly offloading debt they undersigned for data center buildout, but that’s a different issue.
If so, that suggests they’ve learnt since last time. That’s probably for the best, as the banking system collapsing is not a good thing for anyone.
That’s not to say that they should escape scrutiny in all of this.
Other finance gurus have pointed to the fact that AI agents might simply go haywire, regardless of what they’ve been instructed to do.
“You’re assuming they’re going to act properly on your behalf and they may not,” JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon told a room full of economists and financial experts in Chicago earlier this month. “You can’t stop it. You just have to, like, manage the hell out of it.”
Jamie fucking Dimon having a sensible take on AI was not on my bingo card for 2026
Banks Preparing for Aftermath of Unprecedented Catastrophe Caused by AI: “You can’t stop it.”
That’s because they don’t act, they generate. Generate this, generate that. With some probability and degree of fitting the criteria set, much better than spewing random sequences.
One can manage people the same way as LLMs, one can’t manage LLMs the same way as people.
And if you build proper processes in managing people, using people might be more profitable honestly in everything I can imagine, even support bots, that employs people.
If only there was some sort of institution whose job was to review the viability of investments. Maybe they’re supposed to determine when a company might become profitable before giving them financial backing to buy hardware that hasn’t been manufactured to be put in a data center that hasn’t been built to sell access to models at a loss that will be obsolete in 6 months by competitors.
Or even make the people who borrowed the money actually pay it back, or go bankrupt, like we would have to, billionaires be like, too broke, can’t pay, meh, excuse me while I holiday on my fourth favourite yacht at my own private island.
Really. An untested and unregulated service runs with no profit or plan for profitability and the banks are only now asking who is driving this.
Banks preparing for the catastrophe they gladly helped fund.
Kinda like billionaires with their apocalypse shelters. If they had any self-awareness, they could just stop and maybe invest in mitigation and prevention of certain catastrophic scenarios.
But no matter how rich they are, they just want more and can’t help themselves.
Banks and businesses are not self-aware either.
Apocalypse shelters are more of a dream of a new world where there’ll be fewer people and more air and green, but you need to be prepared. People like “clean sheet” dreams, like “I’ll erase this and start anew, that’ll be magnificent”, except it won’t, you had 3 levels of a house, you’ve erased them, now you only have some wet ground and nowhere to sleep. OK, one level with a bad roof. Not better. EDIT: Much better, except it would be even better not erasing anything.
I mean, post-apocalypse is a pretty common escapist setting, makes perfect sense people with money and no imagination wanted to turn it into their “not for everyone” elitarian fantasy and fashion instead of something common, that has also happened with ideas of trans-humanism and new secret societies and what really not. Some folks with nothing interesting in their personality try to feel special by impeding others in engaging in games pretty common in our humanity and our time in particular.
I frankly feel as if that whole thing with enshittifying the Web and computing were also an irrational thing, people with power just having that desire to spoil a good thing for others so that it became rare and elitarian.
Getting back to apocalypse shelters, variations of that were a pretty common hobby for like everyone even in poorer countries. Be that a bit of amateur radio, hiking, making a shack in the woods, picking up mushrooms, science-fiction and fantasy reading groups, a whole lot of hobbies.
We’re just living in a time when unfortunately people with money and no personal qualities of note are trying to make everything “magical” and “interesting” a sign of status and take it from the rest.
So, about practical possibility of an apocalypse and “clean sheet” dreams, those people will be the first to die. No, nobody will kill them, they’ll just find out that in a post-apocalyptic word you die from catching a cold, breaking a leg, getting an infection, letting your food spoil, miscalculating time and direction and all those mistakes are more likely when you are used to fixing mistakes with money, and you won’t have that, you’ll just have a stockpile of tools and materials, which can be used for exchange, but in a functional world money buys logistics, and in a post-apocalyptic world it doesn’t, so a mistake will remain a mistake. No matter what you have, that won’t synthesize a doctor when there’s no doctor. EDIT: And, of course, someone may, in fact, kill you.
So - for smarter people it’s a hobby, for the dumber kind it’s a compensation strategy that (if we are being compassionate) won’t be tested. In general such preppers, especially playful billionaires, often manage to die from stupidity without any apocalypse, I forgot what that submarine was called with an X-Box controller instead of a helm.
So - this might read as a very angry text, I’m sort of the stupider kind myself, regularly risking getting an infection or breaking something, but I still live in a big city with doctors and transport and groceries.
The banks are circling like vultures waiting for the next huge SOCIALISTIC payout to bail their asses out. 2007-2008 repeat! They made their money and will own the property after the shit hits the fan.
Preparing by making sure the shareholders will get a boat load of money paid for by the rest of us
I’m fully convinced that AI will destroy our ability to process financial transactions through the internet. The digital economy is toast. We will be back to paying cash in person for everything.
That would be a godsend. We can only hope.
i think that may be an improvement.
I did hate carrying change though. I’m never happy
Don’t worry, inflation is making it so a single dollar will be practically useless soon. Literally nobody will give a fuck about coins. A homeless person would spit in your face if you gave him 50 cents, because it’d be that insulting. Coins will have a melt value significantly higher than their face value.
Impossible. The elite want to know where every penny you spend goes, and it’s too hard with cash
You’re more likely to see credit cards only allowed through Google Pay or Apple Pay than going back to cash
They’ll claim it’s having to support so many third party’s in the chain causing the problem, so we need 2 “trusted” entities
I don’t think that’s what the elites intend. I think their arrogance will lead them to think they can control something they don’t understand and that will bite us all in the ass
Hell yeah. Bring it on
I’m astonished that anyone would trust their bank login to a chatbot. But if you read the article, the banks aren’t worried about depositors loosing money, they’re worried about AI getting a better deal for their customers.
Mr. Banks declared, “YOU CAN’T STOP IT, THE UNPRECEDENTED CATASTROPHE CAUSED BY THE AIS, THEY ARE COMING FOR ALL OF US!!”
Except its not caused by the computer programs, it’s caused by their own financial decisions.
Translation: Banks are pulling stock investments to crash the economy so they can beg the Democrats for a bail out.
What hints at them trying to crash it? Or you’re thinking that they’re trying to crash to keep the markets reliance on bank loans?
I find the article’s premise that optimizing individual returns will wreck the banking system very dubious. In all other parts of the financial system (risk-adjusted) greed is good, but when retail customers do it then it’s bad?
Almost like the system is designed to increase wealth inequality 🤯
The terrifying AI catastrophe here is apparently that customers might finally move their money to accounts paying decent interest. Banks spent decades automating every trick to extract profit from us, but the second consumers automate looking for a better deal, suddenly it’s a systemic threat. Funny how innovation becomes dangerous the moment it works for the customer.
Banks are the largest mafia on the planet. They literally have a license to print money. Not even the government can do this. When things go south, they are bailed out with our money. Even after the worst crisis, they have a ridiculously low capital requirement of 2.5%.
Never expect criminal scum to just accept one of their sources of income being taken away.
Banks were condemned for money laundering.
They helped drug traffickers to launder their blood money…5 billions of suspicious transactions in bank of america and they looked the other way.
Meanwhile Trump’s admins first 3 months saw him dismantle the agency division charged with monitoring and controlling laundering and financial crimes. Curious that.
Usually banks dislike money laundering in a form where they have to actively look away… They prefer to maintain plausable deniability…
Yet people write off Bitcoin as “for criminals” while glossing over the fact no one can print more of it, and it cannot be taken away from you (without you fucking up).
There is literally no better option in terms of holding and protecting your own wealth.
Yet still, in 2026, I can almost guarantee nothing but down votes and/or replies all about how it’s BS, etc, etc.
Not trying to be snarky, it’s just sad that the vast majority of people won’t ever get a good explanation of how it works.
There is literally no better option in terms of holding and protecting your own wealth.
Crypto is the glass cannon of financial security. Yes, you optimize for a single variable…at the cost of everything else.
Crypto is good at resisting computer-based hacking and money printing, but it’s far worse than the conventional banking systems at social hacking, physical coercion, or accidental loss.
Basically, nerds love to latch onto crypto because they view it from its interesting technical properties. But they ignore the real risks to money. Banks aren’t being hacked left and right to have their funds drained. But social engineering drains accounts every day. The crypto nerds are more comfortable with computers than with people, so they focus on the computer-centered threats than the human ones.
I’m a bit torn on Bitcoin. I used to think the same as you, but now it seems to me that Bitcoin is way too easy to control. State actors could quite easily acquire enough hash power to take over the network, mining is too concentrated already. I think Monero is much more true to the original idea of Bitcoin, probably also one of the reasons it’s always branded as a coin for criminals, to prevent people from looking into it.
It’s also, unfortunately, just not that practical. Most people don’t want to be their own bank. Your “unless you fuck up” is not quite true, what do you do if someone breaks into your house and threatens to shoot you if you don’t hand over your keys? That’s the true purpose of a bank, outsourced security.
While crypto is cool, it’s not required to solve this, full-reserve banking would be sufficient.
Bitcoin is way too easy to control.
Bitcoin is the hardest form of money in existence to control. Manipulation is not control. I’m pretty sure you’re thinking of manipulation.
State actors could quite easily acquire enough hash power to take over the network
With respect, you need to learn more about how Bitcoin works, in particular the concept of “difficulty” and also options for defending against bad actors. Or you think the decade and a half plus Bitcoin has been running, not one single person/entity/state actor would try it?
mining is too concentrated already
TOO concentrated? No, otherwise Bitcoin wouldn’t exist anymore. Could it be less concentrated? For sure. Couldn’t the power the polticians and banks have be less concentrated? And it’s within most people’s means to be part of the solution against mining concentration…see: OCEAN pool for one.
Most people don’t want to be their own bank.
Most people don’t. Having bitcoin doesn’t mean you have to be your own bank. Just that you have that option if and when the need arises. It’s not one extreme (be your own bank) or the other (reject bitcoin entirely).
what do you do if someone breaks into your house and threatens to shoot you if you don’t hand over your keys?
Well, what do you do if someone breaks into your house and threatens to shoot you if you don’t hand over your cash, credit cards, and valuable possessions? I for one could a) say that I don’t memorise my keys and they are stored outside of my home, b) give them keys to a duress wallet. What can you do?
I can’t say Bitcoin is the only solution to things, but it’s by far the best tool we’ve been given so far. My argument has always been, the only way Bitcoin dies is if the whole advanced world works together to ban it. And if you think the whole world is going to cooperate on anything when self-interest and game theory heavily incentivizes involvement…
Just take some time to learn about how it works, not just “what it is”. That’s what holds people back.
Most people don’t. Having bitcoin doesn’t mean you have to be your own bank. Just that you have that option if and when the need arises. It’s not one extreme (be your own bank) or the other (reject bitcoin entirely).
Then there’s no god damn point. Bitcoin at a Bitcoin bank is just a regular bank with an incredibly, comically inefficient transaction tracking system.
Well, what do you do if someone breaks into your house and threatens to shoot you if you don’t hand over your cash, credit cards, and valuable possessions?
Cash and possessions are one thing, but that’s not how most people keep their real financial assets. A thief can steal my credit card all they want. They’re not getting much use out of it.
Hey crypto-investor! I’m letting you know I’m about to print my own crypto from the open-source bitcoin! Buy my alt-coins now! Your profits are about to go to the moon! Buy CON-coin! The only difference between it and bitcoin is hype and branding! Get in before it’s too late! Computers go brrrrrr infinite ponzi-schemes.
Uh yep, pretty much what I expected 😂
The hard part is people that seriously think like that don’t realize how utterly and completely stupid they sound to anyone who does take the time to understand it. They’ll happily go through life saying stuff like that and never actually be able to make a good argument.
Edit: omg that wasn’t satire…my bad. Sorry I even replied 😂
So the agents move money from the regular account to a high interest account for days or weeks, keep on the lookout for accounts with even better conditions, and move just enough money back for the probably scheduled mortgage payment and other regular bills. That means the money doesn’t stay sleeping in the regular account where the bank can use it to make profits. And they’re very afraid everyone starts doing this, calling it an AI powered bank run.
That does sound like a bit of a risk. Similar to how high frequency trading affects stability of shares and elevates risk of mass sell-offs - if these agents had enough use from the general public, they could easily impact the stability of a bank.
Shit, I’ve been doing this manually. It takes maybe an hour of combined time to look on NerdWallet for the highest APY HYSA, make an account, link the old one, move everything over, and close out the old one. Automating that sounds nice though.
