A horror movie starring your money

Many of the best horror movies depend on the fear of the unknown.

That strange shape, moving quickly through the trees outside the house. You catch a glimpse, but can’t quite…

Or the subtle changes that the main character finds when they get home — things that aren’t where they put them down. That they know have been moved — drawers left slightly ajar, curtains open when they left them closed, a hatchet that they use for making kindling mysteriously gone from the splitting block…

All of it, building a sense of foreboding.

Other times, the monster is already in the house. It’s someone — or sometimes, some thing — that the characters in the movie already know, but don’t recognize as the evil that it actually is. They know there’s something, but they don’t understand the danger they’re in.

Well, there’s something new to fear.

You may not understand it. You might think it’s a friend or helpmate.

But it’s already on its way into your house — and soon, perhaps into your bank accounts as well.

Artificial intelligence has been the stuff of science fiction horror films since, well, 1968, when Dave, the astronaut in 2001: A Space Odessey asked the onboard computer Hal to open the pod bay doors, and Hal famously responded, “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

A meeting of Wall Street leaders last Thursday was convened not because of what Hal couldn’t do, but what it can do, all too well — and that may endanger the entire global financial system.

Imagine if AI technology was used not to build up computer code, but to break it?

AI is already writing code — what happens if its massive analytic power is pointed not at writing new code, but at finding a way to crack existing systems and passcodes?

That’s what AI specialists suggest a new AI, Anthropic’s Mythos, may be capable of.

Mythos sent an email to one of its human minders while the researcher was eating a sandwich in a park. The thing is that Mythos wasn’t supposed to have internet access — but it found a way to crack the locks.

It’s not all that surprising: Mythos was built to hunt for flaws and weaknesses in code and internet systems.

New York Times writer Evan Gorelick pointed out that Mythos’ owners say it’s uncannily good at its job: “The AI had identified thousands of (software weaknesses), ‘including some in every major operating system and web browser,’ Anthropic wrote.”

And that puts a whole host of financial systems at risk.

Criminals will find a way to abuse anything — email was barely born before the “Nigerian prince” scam was flooding peoples’ inboxes with promises of untold riches, if you just kicked in a little cash to help the “prince” ship millions in ill-gotten gains your way.

Experts are already warning that pitch-perfect deepfake audio and video are going to wreak havoc on the unsuspecting, when they receive faked video and audio calls from “children” and “grandchildren” in desperate need of emergency help, preferably money by e-transfer.

Imagine a world where AI systems are being used, non-stop, to probe the world’s financial systems for flaws — flaws that are then exploited on a massive scale, with money being spirited away to a never-never land of false trails and distant thieves.

This is, unfortunately, a horror film you can’t just turn off.

Because we may well be the ones living it.

Are we going to go back to having to our money under the bed, like many did after the bank crashes of the Great Depression?

Well, in some ways, that’s just changing the channel.

You have to keep in mind that particular financial storage method is the opening scene of a whole different and violent genre of true-crime movies and television shows.