EXCLUSIVE: The question of would you kill baby Hitler is a fun moral quandary – however, rarely do people actually ask what would what happen if you took out the despot while he was in diapers
“Would you kill baby Hitler” is a moral quandary that gets thrown around fairly often. Could you stomach the guilt of ending the life of a newborn child and go on to prevent some of the worst crimes humanity has ever faced?
Could you prevent one of the bloodiest human conflicts in the form of World War Two or would the guilt of killing an infant be too much to bear? One interesting part of this thought experiment that never gets enough attention is exactly how history would be different if someone was able to successfully ‘off’ baby Hitler.
To get to the bottom of this hypothesis we asked OpenAI’s ChatGPT what would happen if a time traveller went back in time to murder the megalomaniac when he was still soiling his nappies.
The AI notes one obvious brilliant consequence of putting a premature end to baby Hitler: the Nazi party would simply not exist and this could potentially have meant no Second World War.
Alongside this the artificial intelligence model highlights that Europe – and in extension the world – could have seen a more peaceful era without the aggressive foreign policies of Hitler.
Hitler’s rise led to the Holocaust, which included the murder of six million Jews, along with millions of other people across Europe. The AI tool notes without Hitler the Holocaust might not have happened, or it might have taken a different form under another leader.
While anti-Semitism existed in Europe before Hitler it is unlikely the horrifying scale of the Holocaust would occur on the same scale without the dictator, due to it being uniquely tied to his racial ideology and expansionist policies.
One of the most interesting factors the AI bot highlights is that the removal of baby Hitler could result in both England and France continuing to have stronger European influence and the United States may not have emerged as the dominant global superpower.
The tool highlights: “WWII was a catalyst for the United States to become the world’s superpower” and without Hitler the Second World War might not have occurred.
The question of what would happen if you killed baby Hitler quickly becomes one of what a world would potentially look like without the Second World War.
Despite its horrors World War Two accelerated technological advancements, particularly in fields like rocketry, aviation and medicine. Without it, this could have resulted in the technology we have looking somewhat different and potentially less advanced.
Without the Second World War the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union might have been delayed and global power dynamics and relationships between the two superpowers might have developed differently.
The Open AI’s artificial intelligence model is conscious that killing baby Hitler could cause the butterfly effect and cause massive ripples in the future.
The death of baby Hitler might not have only prevented World War Two but also influence a number of different events in ways we can’t predict such as the Cold War, the space and arms race, and many others.
With all questions surrounding time travel, the tool notes the question of killing baby Hitler presents the age old paradox: “Would tampering with the past create a better world, or merely a different one?”
Could the butterfly effect from the act of killing baby Hitler have created a different future where another dictator may have risen to power and be worse than the bloke who brutalised millions of people?
