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.
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.