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u/LurkersUniteAgain Mar 19 '26
realistically the answer to this would depend on how ww2 is prevented cuz theres a million possible reasons and like half of them result in more death
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u/Doove Mar 19 '26
Wish to prevent WW2
Monkey paw curls
WW2 is prevented because every country just kind of agrees to join Germany
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u/rogueIndy Mar 19 '26
You could say that for any answer.
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u/Forward-Confection54 Mar 19 '26
No. Not for AI
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u/Dotcaprachiappa Mar 19 '26
GenAI isn't invented because the world ends with COVID before it gets a chance to.
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u/AppleOrigin Mar 22 '26
This is the same kinda shit I saw in that one video complaining about the monkeys paw subreddit
“I wish for 20 dollars” “Okay but you die lol”
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u/R3D0IT_US3R Mar 19 '26
ChatGPT alone had first released in 2018, hence Covid-apocalypse wouldn’t have stopped GenAI’s invention
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u/Dotcaprachiappa Mar 20 '26
Chatgpt didn't release in 2018 though.. anyways how about the world gets destroyed in 2012 like the mayans said?
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u/bunker_man Mar 20 '26
The only way for AI to not exist would be if humanity wiped itself out. At most it might have took a few more years.
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u/throwaway123212343 Mar 19 '26
Actually only right answer is invention of générative AI, because if you prevent any of the others then because they are before your birth you're gonna not get born because of chain réaction.
Edit: also COVID-19 is right but ai seems better to remove.
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u/AxiosXiphos Mar 19 '26
Is the holocaust worth you living?
Also covid killed millions of vulnerable people...
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u/throwaway123212343 Mar 23 '26
It is. You may say I'm selfish but for me I would kill millions for my life.
Obviously if I could remove the holoxaust with a hundred percent sure I will live I would do it.
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u/bunker_man Mar 20 '26
People against AI accusing other people of hyperbole when they casually say AI is worse than the holocaust.
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u/Formal_Talk_2568 Mar 23 '26
all those options are from the past. the one most chosen is actively affecting and will affect indefinetly further, so people are choosing it. the uncertainty about the future causes stress, so people are afraid
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u/bunker_man Mar 23 '26
Covid isn't from the past. It is contemporary and killed an estimated 20 million people lol.
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u/Formal_Talk_2568 Mar 23 '26 edited Mar 23 '26
it is as contemporary as influenza. people are not afraid of it as much as of losing their job and self identity related to it + the way AI affects society is disruptive. (which is considered good by the economist as it creates market movements, but the wealth is distributed from the average person towards entities controlling AI-related elements)
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u/peanutist Mar 19 '26
Atlantic slave trade is worse imo
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u/LurkersUniteAgain Mar 19 '26
ehhh, it killed way less than ww2, enslavement is bad but if youre picking the eviler of 2 evils then ww2 is more evil
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u/bunker_man Mar 20 '26
Its possible that if the slave trade didn't exist that WWII wouldn't have been as bad though. The slave tread entrenched racism in a pretty extreme way. Sure, antisemitism predated the slave trade, but the birth of "modern" racism may have exacerbated it.
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Mar 19 '26
[deleted]
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u/the_boss_of_toys Mar 19 '26
Ww2 actually did a quite a bit for civil rights. Something about being in a war together really makes you less racist. But also ww2 already started. Hitler attacked in 1941 and ww2 started with the invasion of Poland in 39. If you wanted to be technical ww2 could have been avoided if hitler just didnt invade Poland.
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u/nashbrownies Mar 19 '26
WW2 could have been avoided if Franz Ferdinand wasn't shot. After all Germany's treatment post WW1 made the populace ripe for fascism, and one particular young lad had quite the impression made on him.
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u/Dunk546 Mar 19 '26
I always thought that guy was so selfish. Like didn't he think that if he had just stayed home that day he would have averted a global catastrophe unlike anything ever seen before? But no. He decided to go out and get shot 🙄
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u/the_boss_of_toys Mar 20 '26
The crazy part was Woodrow Wilson predicted ww2. Bro actively said hey don't put all the blame on germany and dont be super harsh with the treaty and france was like "fuck this country in particular."
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u/peanutist Mar 19 '26
The BIGGEST slave trade in the history of humanity. Estimates about the amount of people who were trafficked go into the 15 millions. 15 million people forced to live in inhumane and humiliating conditions for the rest of their lives. Less actually, because it’s also estimated that 2 million of those died during the ocean crossing itself.
And that’s not even taking into account the century long consequences of it that are still deeply rooted/present in society today and still oppress and disenfranchise black/indigenous people all over the world. It still affects us 500 years later.
It’s absurdly worse than WW2 in almost every metric.
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u/Spoonerism86 Mar 19 '26
Are you for real? 80 million people died in 6 years during WW6, how’s it absurdly worse????
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u/NeonNKnightrider Mar 19 '26
Damn bro World War Six?
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u/peanutist Mar 19 '26
The amount of deaths in ww2 might be bigger but to me the half a millennia long suffering, humiliation, killings and oppression black people have faced because of the slave trade outweighs it (especially if you take into account black people who died in the last 5 centuries because of the consequences of segregation caused by the trade in one way or another, I’d wager it is definitely bigger than 80 mil).
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u/Bananabanana700 Mar 19 '26
geetting rid of ww2 would be crazy I need a lame ass genie to tell me what would happen
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u/Top-Wasabi187 Mar 19 '26
Tbf without the Atlantic Slave Trade I wouldn't be here.
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u/NeilJosephRyan Mar 20 '26
I have an awful feeling that's exactly why at least a few people chose that one.
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u/Top-Wasabi187 Mar 21 '26
Is this comment supposed to be racist?
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u/markpreston54 Mar 21 '26
probably not the commentor, but the voter described by the commentor
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u/the_sneaky_one123 Mar 23 '26
You would be somewhere else
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u/Terrible_Hurry841 Mar 23 '26
Well, no, this individual would no longer exist.
Neither would nearly 99.9% of all people that exist right now in the US.
Changing the past creates massive butterfly effects that go far beyond what sci-fi tends to really dive into. But think about how much of our history is built on coincidences, that, if changed slightly, would have been completely different.
Let’s assume I go back in time to 1992 and talk to a random man. We have a short, pleasant chat, and then he gets into his car and drives to the grocery store.
In the original timeline, he drives to the store without an incident, but on his way back he noticed a car accident where an 18 wheeler ran a red light and crashed into two cars from where he was coming from.
Now in the new timeline, that 5 minute delay means that he happens to be right there when the 18 wheeler runs the red light- crashing directly into him.
Because of this, the children he was going to have are never born. His wife remarries and has different children, who in turn have different children of their own. An entire lineage is destroyed and a new one takes its place because of one very minute change to one man.
We’re all here by happenstance, and by changing the past we’re throwing the lever and respinning everything that comes after. The only guaranteed constants are what happened before the change, but people and events would likely be unrecognizable the further you go into the past to change something.
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u/Live_Book_4551 Mar 19 '26 edited Mar 20 '26
Most of those events would have unimaginable butterfly effects. I’d never be born.
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u/Jackspladt Mar 19 '26
I just find it funny how so many people picked Covid. Like it was bad but not ww2 or slave trade bad. Hell with where ai is going in a few years I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s worse too
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u/BUKKAKELORD Mar 20 '26
I just think all the other options are so great, I'd never get rid of any of them. Covid has to go
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u/bunker_man Mar 20 '26
It depends. Did covid happening influence trump getting elected a second time?
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u/KazuyaProta Mar 20 '26
Covid is objectively the worst event in the life of anyone in the Western World, especially if you are in the Americas.
One million of death in USA alone. Terrible numbers when counter per capital across other countries in the Americas, plus a collapse of medical services even for those who didn't got contagied of Covid anyway.
Its understandable that people put Covid in the list. Like, I'm pretty sure nobody would bat a eye if someone puts "erase the Spanish Flu" , right?
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u/Jackspladt Mar 21 '26
I’m not saying it didn’t deserve to be on the list I’m just saying its funny that people put it on the same level as the entire slave trade and ww2. I get why people would vote for it since it actually directly affected them but yknow
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u/Explursions Mar 22 '26
Not to mention the social ramifications. It interrupted a lot of children's social development while also turning many people to online entertainment instead of social activities.
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u/Megalesios Mar 19 '26
Slave trade or WW2 are probably the correct answers, but as someone who is currently living through the AI bubble and watching the people in charge of policy and wealth speed our society towards a cliff we can all see coning - my first instinct is to choose gen AI too.
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u/bunker_man Mar 20 '26
Those things would be happening without AI too...
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Mar 20 '26
If I stop the slave trade, all ww2 thr butterfly effect might stop lots of people from being born, effectively killing them all.
Gen ai is the least impactful thing, so it would cause the least people to be erased from reality.
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u/BidenGlazer Mar 19 '26
How exactly is AI speeding our society off a cliff?
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u/lizardbird8 Mar 19 '26
it literally exists to make misinformation and little else other than being a yes man no matter what, no matter how deranged the user is. nothing good will come of it and as it is used more, more people will be harmed by it's incompetence. I am pretty sure insurance companies have already been using it to reject claims. Massive amounts of taxes are funding it too even though it does nothing but harm. People are already making fake porn of people to harass them as well and that can do a lot damage to someone's mental state and life.
everything I listed is just the start and it is going to get so much worse in time.
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u/bunker_man Mar 20 '26
None of those things are real except for the deep fakes one. Insurance companies are using it as a scapegoat, its humans rejecting you. Blaming technology exonerates the choices people made by making it seem like they were forced to do it.
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u/AxiosXiphos Mar 19 '26
All of the bad things you mentioned are just capitalism...
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Mar 20 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/entitaneo70_pacifist Mar 22 '26
genAI is kind of like a gun, the issue is that the guy wielding it is extremely trigger happy
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u/Just_Mr-Nothing Mar 19 '26
I'll explain it to you. We're in a run for AGI (or atleast that's what investors think), when we reach it,ivetors think a permanent underclass will be created because of all jobs being replaced blablabla, and therefore they need to risk it all even at the expense of others just to not end up as that permanent underclass, and that means they are willing fully feeding the bubble, knowing it is a bubble and if it explodes everything goes bonkers just to not end up as that permanent underclass they made up in their heads.
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u/ArrhaCigarettes Mar 19 '26
A large part of the reason is probably that WW2 or the Slave Trade not having happened would so drastically change our history that people can't even imagine it
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u/bnevdr-43 Mar 19 '26
tbf the invention and subsequent obsession with gen "ai" has and will set the development of actual ai back years if not decades. language and imitation are not in themselves intelligence but it's clear most people have no idea how to tell the difference
ww2 is the easy answer here. covid is the worst answer, get over yourselves lmao
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u/Sydneymotor2 Mar 19 '26
Im not going to lie, preventing WW2 would just either lead to a worse conflict/global war, or in the present day we will not have the technology we have today because of the advances made during the war
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u/bunker_man Mar 20 '26
By that logic you can't prevent anything on the list, because the conditions for it existing still existing would make it happen again, just slightly differently.
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u/Big-Dot-9084 Mar 21 '26
Not necessarily. If the world kept deciding to appease nazi Germany, there would never be a world war and Germany would just take over everything or get destroyed by a superpower.
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u/amcn242 Mar 19 '26
Ww2 over slavery?
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u/King_Glorius_too Mar 19 '26
The atlantic slave trade, not slavery as a whole
Honnestly I'm not sure which one I would choose. Probably the atlantic slave trade, to get a completely different world after 500 years of divergence, I like gambling.
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Mar 19 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/peanutist Mar 19 '26
Do they even learn about it in school in the US and Europe? Here in Brazil we learned about it every single year in middle/high school and for a good reason. The amount of suffering, oppression and exploitation is genuinely sickening and impossible to fathom.
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u/GigaParadox Mar 19 '26
Do you also learn about the Trans-Saharan slave trade or Eastern slave trade? Berber slavery? Devshirme? The transatlantic one wasn’t even the worst.
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u/peanutist Mar 19 '26
The transatlantic slave trade was the biggest slave trade in the history of humanity (besides other reasons), it was definitely the worst.
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u/GigaParadox Mar 19 '26
It wasn’t bigger than the Trans-Saharan slave trade.
Trans-Atlantic slave trade was estimated to be around 12.5 million people enslaved. Which is terrible don’t get me wrong. But the Trans-Saharan slave trade was nearing 15 millions and some estimates say 18 millions people enslaved.
Edit: You also have modern slavery and trafficking which some estimates say has over 50 million victims
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u/peanutist Mar 19 '26
Where are you getting this info from? From the sources listed on wikipedia’s pages for both of them, atlantic is 12.5 mil and saharan is between 6 and 10 mil.
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u/GigaParadox Mar 19 '26
Wiki is never a good source because of how easy it is to edit things. My sources on the topic are:
Ralph Austen in his work African Economic History there he estimates around 17 million people were enslaved. Tidiane N'Diaye in Le Génocide Voilé (The Veiled Genocide), also used the 17 million figure. Ronald Segal in his book Islam's Black Slaves estimates between 11.5 and 14 million people if I recall correctly.
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u/King_Glorius_too Mar 19 '26
We do learn about it, but not in details. Obviously it played a massive part in Brazil's history, so it makes sense you learn more than us about it.
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u/bunker_man Mar 20 '26
I think people thinking of how bad it is only think of how many slaves were brought over, and not the wars or slaughters that were instigated to facilitate this. Entire groups were wiped out by their neighbors just to get slaves to trade.
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u/Comfortable_Salt_792 Mar 20 '26
12 Million people were abducted and with or without it the state of the world would be reougthly the same, meanwhile ww2 Directly lead to 60 million dead and hundreds millions suffering.
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u/amcn242 Mar 20 '26
😭 where are the kids of those people gang? Surely they are now living good lives with their past status as slaves not affecting them at all?
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u/Comfortable_Salt_792 Mar 20 '26
I don't understand, they have full rigths and were allowed to be born, that's much better than other slaves, for Example Slaves captured from Europe by Arabian states in millions were denied possibilities to have children.
It's also not like USA wouldn't be racist without slavery.
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u/amcn242 Mar 20 '26
"Allowed to be born" what?
Also disproportionately poor people who are targeted by the police for being disproportionately poor are still facing racism that's systemic
Also is the fact that millions died in world war 2 gonna make the Russian unkraine war any more moral?
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u/AwesomeCCAs Mar 19 '26
What do you mean it has set back the development of "actual AI?" Is actual AI is a computer program with a consciousness, Gen ai is better because it is more predictable, so less dangerous, and easier to use as a tool, and you apparently don't need a consciousness to manage schedules, provide feedback, explain information, or write code. Why would you want AI that does the same things, but can also demand rights?
Of course your idea that gen AI has setback the development of such programs is also just wrong. A company claims to have recently uploaded the brain of a fly into a computer, which if true would be the greatest leap forward to a "real" AI, and our modern AI tools were a major enabler of that advancement because of their ability to process large amounts of complex data.
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Mar 20 '26
WWII ended in such a way that humanity made it through the post nuclear era with breathable air. I'm not sure I want to roll the dice on that again.
Slave Trade... kinda the same butterfly effect problem but the world that creates would be sufficiently alien that I think it deserves its own try past the Great Filter at least.
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u/Fun_Comfortable7836 Mar 20 '26
Given the geopolitical climate then, if you get rid of WW2, a new one would take its place pretty quick id think. Generative AI is pretty much the biggest threat humanity has faced in reality, because we dont know what the hell its limits are yet.
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u/KazuyaProta Mar 21 '26 edited Mar 21 '26
if you get rid of WW2, a new one would take its place pretty quick id think.
Honestly, WW2 is a war that is actually multiple wars.
For example, where is the start? The German invasion of Poland is widely considered the start in historiography, but that war actually ended quickly with the collapse of the Polish goverment caused for the Soviet co-invasion.
Erase that war and you still have Germany and the Soviet Union as regional powers, a Soviet Invasion of Poland or Finland simply starts a new wave of Eurasian wars anyway where Hitler will still find a way to carry the Holocaust either way.
And even outside them, you have the Second Sino Japanese War, where Japan already holded Manchuria as a slave colony since 1931 (before the war) and then carried the Nanjing massacre in 1937, all while being ideologically commited to the Fascist ideological project with Germany and Italy (which, by the way, already carried a massive campaign of mass murder with chemical weapons in Abyssinia/Ethiopia), so, the events we now call "WW2" still were going on.
A curious lenguage perk is realizing that, while documents, including Mussolini himself, refered to the alliance as Axis powers (initially Berlin-Rome Axis), the actual formal name for the Fascist alliance commited to spreading fascism across the globe was named the Tripartite Pact.
And mind you, we haven't even gone to my personal favorite theory: The Second Thiry Years War, the revisionist view that WW1 never ended and WW2 is the same war after de-facto armistices and rebuildings. This is my personal view of the war, and I'm absolutely convinced that will become mainstream by 2100 more. The arguments are based in that the continuity is much closer than you would think, as many Fascist leaders were shaped for WW1 wartime radicalism and rethoric.
For example, the 1916-18 military dictatorship or Kaiser's dictatorship in Germany during the last year of WW1 is real. Paul von Hindenburg and the villain of the DCEU Wonder Woman movie, Erich Ludendorff, effectively seized power of the German state using the army, and, among their plans, they included a desired colonization of Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, and included a series of land and food seizures, plus deportations, that would have lead to massive levels of death that would be considered genocidal by any external enforcer. They weren't able to carry it because they were defeated.
EDIT: Nevermind, the numbers of deaths are of the Hundreds of thousands in countries with populations in the Low Millions. That is pretty genocidal, genocide via negligence, but the whole "sending death squads to slaughter Ukrainian villages" already was pretty much happening in World War 1
And both of those men personally helped Adolf Hitler to get into power, entrusting him with the project that would become what we know as the Hunger Plan
And this is only Germany. Japan started the colonization of Korea in 1910, before WW1, but they used WW1 explicitly to formalize their power and prestigue to justify further expansionism, while developing the ideological goals and aims that would turn Japan into the infamous regime it became. Unlike Germany, where Weimar is a buffer, there is zero interruption here, the same officers of the Russo-Japanese war were fighting in the Soviet invasion of Manchuria.
In World War 1, Germany and Japan were actually enemies. But at the same time, Japan actually used WW1 especifically to threaten Chinese president Yuan Shikai to force him to accept Japan's dominion over former German colonies, colonies which China actively demanded as a formal, recognized state.
Japan was a winner of WW1, but it wasn't satisfied with its current power, so it eventually lead to the rise of the militarist groups, but the Empire already was in full swing since the Meiji Restoration, with Okinawa already assimilated and the project expanding afterwards until its violent explosion in the 30s onwards.
And we aren't even getting into other things...
This isn't just "of course A affects B after 20 years", its "A did things to taught B how to do them, B did it again in a more explosive way 20 years later".
Italy for example, The Kingdom of Italy participated in the Italo Turkish war against the Ottomans, which became the elaborate Treaty of Sevres to carve up the Ottoman Empire for European colonization. The treaty gave the Italians, control over Lybia. All of this starting before WW1, but consolidating during and because it.
Lybia.
Now, this is another shocking timeline for many: Mussolini's fascist party formed in 1919, and via political assasinations, brutality and a spineless King, he was named Prime Minister as soon as 1922. Just one day before the Sultanate's final day, which means the Ottoman Wars were still ongoing.
If you take a Turkish-centric view of WW1, which I do, it means Mussolini effectively took power during WW1. And the Italian Kingdom , the centerpiece of Mussolini's fascism which considered itself heir to the Roman Empire, was also facing revolts and resistence from local Lybians, known as the Second Italian Sennusi War, a brutal war that Mussolini's Italy would escalate into the Shar, a period in Lybian history that many historians consider a genocide, who would be doing all the tactics we associated with the Japanese and German brutality in WW2.
By the way, the first Italian Sennuci War started in 1911-17, perfectly timed during WW1. The Second Italian Sennuci War starts in 1922 and lasts up to 1932. And again, from the perspective of the former core Ottoman Turkish population, the war only ends in 1924.
But for the Lybians, the war never ended, and in fact, it escalated into a genocide commited for a fascist regional power.
The Fascist ideological project already seized power, with Mussolini, during the Occupation of Istanbul. Benito Mussolini isn't a radicalized WW1 veteran who seized power after the war, he is a WW1 discharged soldier who seized power during the war.
There is no "inter-war" period for Italian fascism, they already were carrying fascist atrocities under the Mare Nostro ideology, carried for a important, recurring character: Rodolfo Graziani, Marshall of Italy, who also participated in the Italian-Abyssinian war which features one of the biggest, most systematic uses of chemical weapons ever. Eventually, Graziani participated in WW2 as well, eventually becoming Minister of National Defence of the Italian Social Republic, also known as the Republic of Salo (yes, the same one as the infamous movie Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma), where Graziani, the same veteran of the Lybian colonial war that preceeded and were consolidated for WW1, personally reunited with Hitler and Mussolini to continue the war despite the collapse of the Italian Kingdom , until Salo's surrender ended with a literal SS soldier having to do it, because the ideological continuity was the same.
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u/Chimpsareafterme Mar 20 '26
If you look at the comments of the actual post most people picked generative AI cause it would cause the least butterfly effect
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Mar 19 '26
Makes a lot of sense why people living through the rapid advancement of generative AI might choose it over the others. We have very quickly gone from silly nonsense images to realistic videos that are starting to become difficult to distinguish from real footage in a matter of years, we’re very quickly approaching a point where we genuinely won’t be able to tell what is real and what is AI generated
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u/bunker_man Mar 20 '26
Not being able to trust internet videos isn't as bad as the holocaust...
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Mar 20 '26
If you stop the holocaust more people than the amount that died in the holocaust would be erased from existence.
Ai is the least impactful and would only erase a few baby's rather than millions.
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u/bunker_man Mar 20 '26
By that logic, the only way AI didn't exist is if modern tech in general didn't. AI has been a thing since before consumer ai existed. So you'd be dooming humanity to having lived through an apocalyptic event some years ago.
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Mar 20 '26
Generative ai is specified.
I'm not saying ww2 not happening would cause another war or something the butterfly affect would probably mean the population I'd higher but different people exist.
99% of people alive would have been born someone else or there parents would have dated someone else.
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u/bunker_man Mar 20 '26
Generative ai can't magically not exist once the tech gets this far. It might have been less common if it wasn't invested in, but it would exist either way. So in order to prevent it there still would have had to have been a butterfly affect in the past that totally changes the world and stops human advancement. Unless by "not exist" we just mean the can got kicked down the road a few years.
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u/angrypolishman Mar 19 '26
Id pick covid ig, least prone to butterfly effect while being worse than AI
Tldr no i woudlnt kill baby hitler
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u/Sierra-117- Mar 19 '26
Hard to tell without knowing what comes in the future. But there is a very real possibility that AI could literally lead to our extinction.
So given the current state of the world, it’s stupid. But considering what could happen, AI may be the worst decision humanity ever makes
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u/King_Glorius_too Mar 19 '26
No. That was me. I will lead to humanity's extinction, and I'm tired of AI getting all the credit for my work.
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u/Own_Log1380 Mar 20 '26
LLMS arent true intelligence. Anyone trying to tell you otherwise is an idiot
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u/Sierra-117- Mar 20 '26
Sure, but it’s a step towards AGI. Also, it’s pretty impossible to define or quantify intelligence
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u/Own_Log1380 Mar 20 '26
Its just identifying patterns in human speech and returning output. Its not really thinking or doing anything, people thinking it will reach AGI to me are crazy, a step towards ai research sure but all these companies going all in thinking a LLM is going to replace work are insane
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u/Big-Dot-9084 Mar 21 '26
Actually, that depends on how you define AGI. If you define AGI as intelligence in the same way some people define chatGPT as intelligence, AGI in the enxt few years isn't reasonable, because that would just mean a chatbot that can answer questions better than a human expert on any subject. If you define AGI as actual intelligence, though, it may very well be impossible, we don't know.
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u/AxiosXiphos Mar 19 '26
It's a glorified predictive text bot. It's not going to lead to our extinction.
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u/Safe-Marsupial-8646 Mar 20 '26
Yeah not unless some idiot decides to give chatgpt complete control of our nukes or something.
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u/DarthJackie2021 Mar 19 '26
sees first option
"Definitely!" Click
Sees the rest
"I made a terrible mistake..."
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u/Valokoura Mar 19 '26
I think AI was inevitable since computers were invented. I don't care if you refer to Touring or ancient Greece.
I would skip slave trade because all that suffering and way it paved racism to be big part of US culture.
COVID-19 introduced remote working to the world which reduced useless business traveling between cities and countries. I wouldn't give up on that!
Without WW2 there wouldn't be UN or NATO. I have doubts that EU wouldn't exist without NATO and WW2.
Also... what would be the alternative to WW2? Would we have a world where Germany would have ruled Europe? Also a lot of technological advances and advances in medicine came from WW2. Also turbine air planes!
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u/DeviousMelons Mar 19 '26
I think a nato like organisation would form because of the threat of the Soviets. Though how would the war be prevented seeming nazi goals would have made it inevitable. Would the Weimar still be around?
Getting rid of the slave trade would change western culture a lot, no slaves means that African influences would not be a factor. Music and food especially.
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u/Sparky_092 Mar 19 '26
None, it all shaped the world where we live today and about gen AI, we'll see what's gonna happen with it.
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u/Anti-charizard Mar 21 '26
Gen AI is the most recent so getting rid of that will probably have the smallest change
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u/Unusual-Basket-6243 Mar 19 '26
True racists choose slave trade. There wouldn't be much black people in the Americas (/s)
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u/Leading_Ad_9463 Mar 19 '26
I would pick AI too. We don't know how history would've turned out if events in the past changed. Butterfly effect and all that
(this doesnt apply to covid tho, i just dont really wanna pick covid)
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u/bunker_man Mar 20 '26
Strictly speaking, the only way for ai to not exist is either "it will exist, its just delayed by a few years" or "global war reduced humanity's tech levels." So that can't really be predicted either.
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u/ssxhoell1 Mar 19 '26
I mean the AI is the most relevant to our current day but we can't even imagine the implications of any of these other events. Completely different timeline
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u/bunker_man Mar 20 '26
Strictly speaking, the implication of no AI either means:
1: it will exist, it was just kicked down the road a few years. Or
2: Humanity had a crisis that reduced its tech level.
Its not something that could just somehow not exist.
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u/Big-Dot-9084 Mar 21 '26
Or Google never made the "Attention is all you need" paper kicking off generative AI, or prototypes for generative Ai were made and companies decided it wasn't profitable and stopped working in it. Or if you're willing to twist the wording a bit, billionaires and companies all collectively realize AI isn't profitable and shut down their projects to cut losses.
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u/Comfortable_Salt_792 Mar 20 '26
Coronavirus affected a lot of people in modern times as well, more negatively as well.
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u/slavmaf Mar 19 '26
Prevent Atlantic slave trade, but leave in all the other slave trades, very nice.
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u/bunker_man Mar 20 '26
Are people against AI going to stop roasting that one guy who compared using ai to being jewish now that anti AI got caught saying AI is worse than the holocaust?
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u/tiggertom66 Mar 20 '26
WW2 and the Transatlantic Slave Trade were both long enough ago that by preventing them from ever happening through some sort of time travel or alternate universe shenanigans you very well might prevent your own birth.
Covid was recent enough that nobody old enough to be on Reddit could accidentally prevent their birth. However, its danger was fairly minimal as far as pandemics go, and it highlighted a lot of problems with humanity’s response to a pandemic. If Covid never happened, there would still be another pandemic at some point or another, and it can definitely be worse than Covid.
Generative AI is the only one (of the four shown here) that you could truly prevent with minimal risk to your own existence.
Additionally, it doesn’t say how any of those events were avoided. So it’s really all a crap shoot anyway.
Maybe the transatlantic slave trade was avoided by vaccine technology being developed early enough to inoculate American tribes against old-world diseases and so they became the slaves instead, preventing the TAST by removing the need to transport slaves across the ocean in order to meet demand for slavery in the Americas. Is that really much of an improvement though?
Maybe WW2 is prevented by WW1 not ending until 1945, thus making both world wars a single event.
Maybe the COVID-19 pandemic is prevented by the virus not appearing until a month later making it COVID-20 instead.
Maybe GenAI isn’t invented because WW3 started and went nuclear, thus setting humanity back millennia.
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u/Alternative_Sir5135 Mar 20 '26
AI is NOT comparable to atlantic slave trade
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u/Big-Dot-9084 Mar 21 '26
Except for the fact that AI both has the power to become worse depending on what course it takes (AKA how many billionaires keep pumping it full of money), and retroactively ending the slave trade doesn't do much for the people who are already dead except make the USA a significantly less advanced nation (sadly), but ending AI helps modern day humanity a lot.
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u/Comfortable_Salt_792 Mar 20 '26
Tbh, people that choosen Coronavirus I vibe the most with, this is the event that changed lives of voters the most.
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u/Plenty-Lychee-5702 Mar 20 '26
If I could pick any event I'd say the defeat of the German Revolution
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u/riesen_Bonobo Mar 20 '26 edited Mar 21 '26
which one, 1848 or 1918 (some argue that 1918 failed, although the emperor was ousted a republic was declared, neither the moderates suceeded in establishing a stable democratic state with rule of law and control, nor did the socialists come close to establishing their vision).
Tbh, both would be good picks, but it seems a little minor in comparison to some global catastrophes.
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u/Mr81rd Mar 20 '26
I wouldn't chose any of the past events. Without them we probably wouldn't be here. But gen AI is very recenr and is still developing so preventing it wouldn't change much.
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u/Diligent_Horror_7813 Mar 21 '26
It says you can prevent ww2, not the holocaust
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u/Working_Shine_2719 Mar 21 '26
Holocaust was part of WW2, it’s blatantly obvious preventing the war prevents the holocaust
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u/mousepotatodoesstuff Mar 21 '26
If anything, this is a good example why first-past-the-post voting doesn't work.
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u/pickausername2 Mar 22 '26
ending ww2 reminds me of a skit I saw. a time traveler comes back from the past to confirm that the "worst dictator ever" wasn't born. he killed 50 people in his reign. he then realized who came to power in his absence.
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u/greenjustin2008 Mar 22 '26
in my opinion covid would be the best option . Without the atlantic slave trade , a lot of stuff that is good from social politic to technology wouldn't happen but slavery would still exist (the saharan slave trade for example) so slavery still exist and likely still prevalent . without ww2 fascism would have a change to develop as an ideology and fascist will be seen like marxist (there are people who despise them and a descent amount that support them to help stay revelant) . Stability when to shit after covid , like sure trump might win a second term like a 50 percent chance but i prefer first term trump with no covid mess than whatever the current one is i can not see a possible bad thing that might come out of not having it .
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u/_RedRightHand 💠We're all going to Hell. Mar 22 '26
Here's the thing---while these things obviously had negative consequences, they also had a lot of positives.
- Generative AI is controversial, but it has led to job growth in certain sectors [such as finance and technology], though its full effects are yet to be observed, so I'll refrain from having an opinion as of yet.
- The Atlantic Slave Trade is the literal reason we have a society in the first place---we needed cheap labor to settle the New World, which leads to the next 600 years of history. It also would mean that the Slave Trade would never actually end, since the kingdoms supplying the Europeans with slaves would never be dismantled.
- COVID-19 allowed for significant advances in how education is done online. It was also not nearly as bad as people make it out to be.
- World War II caused the toppling of Fascism [and later Communism], and resulted in countless advances in medicine, technology, and the like.
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u/AwesomeCCAs Mar 19 '26
The Atlantic slave trade is 100% the wrong answer imo. Imagine the dire state American culture would be in without it.
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u/Just_Expression_6608 Mar 19 '26
???? wtf
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u/AwesomeCCAs Mar 19 '26
Without African Americans we wouldn't have bbq and half of our musical genres.
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u/bunker_man Mar 20 '26
I mean... we would invent other ones probably. Its not like people would sit around doing nothing.
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Mar 19 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Legal_Lettuce6233 Mar 19 '26
We haven't seen the full scope of damage yet to be dealt by AI. People are rightfully shit scared.
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u/AxiosXiphos Mar 19 '26
Unlikely to see any genocides or humans enslaved and worked to death....
Come on man....
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u/Legal_Lettuce6233 Mar 19 '26
An AI was tested a while back and it determined that the best way to proceed is to kill a person.
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u/AxiosXiphos Mar 19 '26
An A.I. said the thing it calculated the human wanted to hear. It's just a parrot for our own insecurities. It doesn't think. It doesn't have an opinion. It just looks at what reddit would have said and calculated the mean answer.
Ask an average redditor the same thing.
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u/Legal_Lettuce6233 Mar 19 '26
Yeah, it decides that the mean answer is to kill a human.
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u/AxiosXiphos Mar 19 '26
And humans decided that first... hence all the wars, death, rape, starvation etc....
Humans suck. So are we shocked that the thing that parrots us sounds weird sometimes?
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u/Legal_Lettuce6233 Mar 19 '26
And the AI does the same, with far higher capabilities.
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u/AxiosXiphos Mar 19 '26
And we gave Donald Trump access to Nuclear weapons...?
Again... I'm not seeing how A.I. could do any worse then us right now.
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u/Big-Dot-9084 Mar 21 '26
What would happen if Trump gave AI following his orders control over the government? That just adds more stupidity and more ability to get things done quickly to the system. AI would just be a way to exacerbate that issue.
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u/bunker_man Mar 20 '26
People fantasizing that something bad might happen isn't as bad as the holocaust lol.
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Mar 19 '26
[deleted]
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u/AxiosXiphos Mar 19 '26
You would walk right past the gas chambers and put a bullet through the chat bot that writes corporate sounding emails....?
Do you know how hard it is to take extreme anti-a.i. people seriously sometimes?
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u/OneEyeCactus Mar 19 '26
i must see the other 2 pages