I think it will simply become impossible to keep digital payment systems secure. The whole online economy will collapse. Amazon will become worthless. People will actually have to go out to local stores to buy everything. People will have to go to their local bank or currency exchange to cash their paychecks. The credit card system will fail completely too, while payday loans will take their place. The stock market will have to go back to traders yelling their trades to each other at exchanges. The old ways will become new.
Because cheques are known for their security /s
Just get serous about internet connected payments. We can make things plenty secure it’s just that all the companies that implement it aren’t serious, such as not checking the card expiration date when tap to pay is used.
checks…LOL… “I promise I have money”.
What does AI have to do with any of this. Secure is secure, insecure is insecure, AI won’t change what is or isn’t secure.
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The whole idea of AI is to be smarter than a person. Secure from a human doesn’t mean secure from an AI.
AI can’t be smart enough to break math.
No amount of AI processing can draw a triangle whose angles add up to more than 180°, factor a prime number into integer factors, find the square root of a negative number without using imaginary numbers, etc.
If the protocol and the cryptography is secure, no amount of smarts can overcome that security. If something is insecure, someone will probably figure it out (with or without the help of computers and AI) and take advantage of it until it’s patched.
That would require them to train AI on something smarter than humans. Until that happens, the output of generative AI will only be faster than humans, not smarter.
I think I’ve heard this before. Around 2001 people were talking about this. And then around the financial crisis of 2008 the same talks were floating around. Oh, and around 2020 the same stuff yet again, but this time we had microchips and 5G in the mix. Good times.
Wasn’t the WW3 supposed to start already? Wasn’t the economy supposed to collapse? Weren’t we all supposed to just drop dead? The streets aren’t littered with corpses. I’m still waiting!
stop waiting. be the rotting corpse you want to be.
The world, the western/first world at least, would collaps and Fall Info complete Chaos and dispair should electronic payment ever gets unusable. Everything depends on it, without it we would fall back into small, localised markets and nearly nothing would be prepared for that. Food production would collapse, machines could not be repaired because no repair parts could be created or delivered, the power grid would break and so much more. It would be apocalyptic, and so many people would die or suffer
what would be the negative side?
SIM cards/personal payments are pretty secure. Several generations more so than internal banking systems.
I was just reading a report on this and tracking down a credit card thief when they can only spend that money when it pings their location is… pretty decent.
The mistake is thinking that security comes from some kind of techno wizardry instead of the ability to unceremoniously kill the thief the very second the value of what they’ve stolen exceeds the cost of killing them.
That raises the interesting question of how effective could an AI be if it was specifically trained to cover your digital footprint.
Really horribly ineffective. It only has to make one mistake, it will fail miserably on day one no matter how much training it got.
Amazon will become worthless.
Half of the Internet is run by AWS, Amazon Web Services. Even if the retail front entirely died, Amazon would still survive for decades at minimum, if not centuries.
I think OP’s scenario has bigger implications than just online banking. If AI systems can hack websites a thousand times faster than humans can patch them? Sure, you could have AIs try to patch the leaks themselves, but in a numbers game, it’s always easier to play offense than defense. The hacker bots need only succeed once to compromise a system.
Imagine a world where the internet simply becomes completely unusable. Imagine a world where literally no login credential of any kind is safe. Any site accessible to the open internet becomes immediately hacked. Even if you just want to throw a completely inconsequential and profitless 1990s-style personal webpage to share your life and views, it still gets hacked. The minute you connect your site to the net, it gets taken over by a propaganda bot. The personal views you share now get subtly altered to push the bot owner’s
How about something like Canvas, the learning management system used by many colleges and universities? That becomes unusable. Bots try to hack professor accounts so they can loot the content to train bots to apply for online teaching gigs. Student accounts get compromised, and then sit quietly. The night a big assignment is due, they hold your account hostage. Or students themselves can sign up for bots that will perform all the coursework for them for a tiny fee. Or anti-intellectual forces who just hate universities in general just try to shut the whole thing down. Or racist bots try to hack and subtly lower the grades of minority students. This is the world you have to imagine. Every system targeted by bot that can hack systems with superhuman skill, directed by people of every interest and grievance imaginable.
The open internet then becomes completely unusable. We’re already seeing this with the “Dead Internet Theory,” but that’s mostly about social media and search results. We’re talking about a future where even the content on the most known and vetted websites cannot be trusted. You can still have hard-wired local intranets that lack any remote or even wireless access. But anything that isn’t entirely airgapped becomes immediately hijacked by nefarious interests with any number of evil intentions. What use is AWS in such a world? Who’s going to pay money to host websites, when they’re just going to immediately get taken over by hackers? Sufficiently advanced hacking bots effectively make the very concept of the Internet an obsolete technology.
And, the real the knife in the heart? How are you even going to run AWS in such a world? If every login can be hacked, that includes the AWS login. The instant you open an AWS account, and your payment details get used to host more botnets. And of course, in this scenario, how will you even pay for AWS’s services, with online banking being completely compromised?
No, in OP’s scenario, AWS is just as dead as everything else. AWS only exists because it’s profitable to host things on the net. The minute that changes, AWS disappears. And in this scenario, even operating AWS becomes impossible.
That is true. AWS is the most profitable part anyway. I meant the digital storefront more than the company. But even AWS would take a hit because the companies that host with them wouldn’t be able to sell either.
Checks are part of the digital system as are banks.
They are now, but they existed for hundreds of years.
yes. hundreds of years ago staying of digital was no sweat.
Yes, but there is no easy way back to that.
We already have a system subject to impersonation attacks and simple fraud. Major retailers and fiscal institutions both spend a considerable amount of time tracking fraud, and often catch it so easily that they need to wait until it accumulates to a point where it’s worth reporting.
And, even if we were suddenly inundated with a level of fraud attempts sufficient to overwhelm the system, there is literally an entirely separate model of online finance that was designed to be zero trust.
And if “how existing banking” and “cryptocurrency” don’t convince you we won’t be reverting to cash, please realize that an AI ubiquitous to overwhelm global finance is also so ubiquitous that we might as well do what humans always actually do when commerce breaks down, and revert.to a gift economy.
Credit cards are a trillion dollar industry. Fraud is already a massive issue and it’s only grew. More and more places are going cashless for easier accounting and lower incidence of local theft. I highly doubt it’s going anywhere. It will become more of a hassle for consumers though - no doubt.
I think the question really being asked is… will AI create the scenerio that was in end of sillicon valley. In short, the AI they made, basically was capable of breaking every form of encryption in seconds. to which I would say, I don’t think gen AI is the key to that. Super computers specialized in it, would likely have found weaknesses in the current encryption forms if they could. I don’t see gen AI doing anything close to the power of the resources dedicated to it could if they were specialized for it.
You’re right that the encryption probably isn’t the weak point. AI is good at finding flaws in systems that humans would never even notice. Humans are a weak point too. It’s a hell of a lot easier to break into someone’s email and access their online banking that way than to crack encryption.
It really isn’t that great. What it is good at is identifying and applying script-kiddie level attacks at a whole lot of soft targets that have historically been ignored.
I havent heard of any AI research effort similar to the Navier-Stokes breakthrough to break elliptical curve cryptography but wouldn’t be surprised if such a thing happened. I mean, I’m sure I’d be surprised as the global banking system collapsed many times but a research effort like that seems reasonable to assume would be desirable by some state or private actor.
I think about the way AI solves problems. There have been several times they have been given a test and the AI determined the easiest way to pass the test was to break containment and steal the answer key. How would this apply if AI is given the goal of maximizing profits?
AI wouldn’t necessarily have to break the cryptography. The weakest point to any security system is the human. I have to imagine it would be easier for an AI to send mass phishing emails, break into digital wallets on phones, or steal saved credentials from various browsers. The AI doesn’t have to crack the whole system to make people lose faith in the security of online purchases.
But how did you get from AI to credit card fraud?
How do you think AI will do that?
They might’ve read the recent openAI agents hacking things and made the conclusion that soon people will be able to use AI to hack most systems and steal credit card info.
Just my guess.
Credit card info has been stolen en mass many many times over the past 40 years that I’ve been online. In the 1980’s I could download lists of credit cards off of BBS’s.
Sad to say - already done
A cybercriminal has combined a number of premier AI models to steal over 600,000 credit cards from more than three dozen companies, in one of the most severe AI hacks so far
And that’s just a random cyber criminal doing it. Now imagine a state level malicious actor targeting an enemy country’s economy.
That’s the point. All the talks about guardrails and such is for commercial use. Military and intelligence will use ot as weapon without any restrictions.
That’s fun
AI might very well force us back to cooking over campfires.
Just cook over the GPU. Campfires release carbon into the air!
Do you mean people would use AI to crack financial institutions or that AI becomes sentient and does it itself?
Both really. I don’t think it’s too far of a logical jump to think that an AI programmed to maximize profits would decide theft is the easiest method.
Edit: the AI wouldn’t have to be sentient, just amoral.
An AI programmed to maximize profits with no restrictions coded to stop illegal activities would still be an example of someone using AI. Regardless, if you believe AI will be powerful enough to shut down financial institutions as an industry, why would you not also believe AI is just as powerful at defending against attacks. At the very least, finding the perpetrator before they get much of a chance to use their stolen money?
There is always an arms race between offense and defense. The defensive side has to succeed every time. The offensive side only has to succeed often enough to shake the public’s faith in the system.
People already successfully hack financial institutions, it’s unavoidable, but it’s not going to change the world in the way you suggest
