Brits completely satisfied at hand their wallets to AI so bots can handle their funds
Brits have revealed they would be comfortable handing their bank accounts to AI with teens in particular trusting robots to oversee their spending habits
Many Brits have revealed they wouldn’t mind handing control of their bank accounts over to an AI ‘companions’ (Stock)
A new study has revealed many Brits trust artificial intelligence tech more than their friends when it comes to money. And some would even be happy placing the machines in charge of their spending habits and bank accounts in future.
The research found teenagers are using AI to support their shopping needs, with a third are already using it to find, compare, and review products and services.
The probe into youngsters’ spending habits also found a third of them would happily hand over control of their bank balances to an AI-run shopping assistant – which would then choose and pay for their products on its own.
The Mastercard research echoed a prediction from AI futurist Magnus Lindkvist that we will soon place all our trust in AI “companions” as we hand the reins of many of our financial decisions over to intelligence models.
The research found some Brits trust AI when it comes to shopping more than their mates (Stock)
Magnus reckons these bots will haggle with companies and other AI over prices on our behalf and even tells us “no” when we are making reckless financial decisions.
The prediction comes despite warnings from other boffins that computers could run riot if given too much freedom. Magnus said: “Every great shift in commerce has been, at heart, a shift in trust.
“From the marketplace to the mall, to the catalogue, to the click of a button, each historic evolvement of commerce has asked people to place trust somewhere new.”
He said: “By 2030, buying and shopping will no longer mean the same thing.
“AI agents will handle routine buying, leaving shopping as something we choose to do for discovery, inspiration and pleasure.”
But Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey said we should all be concerned by “the wider risk posed by frontier AI to the financial sector and its customers”.
He warned: “Frontier AI may make cyber-attacks faster and easier to perpetrate, outages more disruptive, and scams by criminals more convincing.”
Numerous AI experts have sounded the alarm
The development comes after an AI researcher quit his post over fears robots could “kill us all” in the next 10 years.
Jacob Coxon has voiced his concerns about Anthropic, a company known for developing the Claude family of large language models. It follows news reported by the Financial Times that claimed Anthropic has withheld its latest model from the UK’s AI Safety Institute, a leading body in the assessment of AI safety.
Researcher Coxon announced his resignation on X on Wednesday morning (September 9), alleging there is a lack of “responsibility” in the AI industry that is “gambling” with human life.
“I resigned from Anthropic today,” he said. “I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”
Coxon went on to advise his followers not to “underestimate the power of this technology”. He added: “These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionise any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains, and progress is not slowing.”
Tech expert Coxon also issued a terrifying warning that AI could “kill” the human race by 2030. He added: “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.
“This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible – but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.”
