What Are You Lot Up To?

If a TV programme sets about sequencing the genome of Adolf Hitler – the person in modern history who comes closest to a universally agreed-upon personification of evil – there are at the very least two questions you want the producers to ask themselves. First: is it possible? And second, the Jurassic Park question: just because scientists can, should they?

Channel 4’s two-part documentary Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator is not the first time the self-consciously edgy British broadcaster has gone there. In 2014’s Dead Famous DNA, it inadvertently answered both these questions in the negative. Having first cast aside ethical integrity by paying Holocaust denier David Irving £3,000 for a lock of hair purporting to belong to Adolf Hitler, the programme’s makers then discovered it not to be Hitler’s and thus useless for DNA sequencing.

Airing just over 10 years later, the producers of this new programme at least made sure to answer the “is it possible” bit. Inside an obscure military history museum in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, they managed to track down a blood-drenched swatch of fabric cut by a US soldier from the sofa on which Hitler killed himself. In their attempt to authenticate the blood, they failed to get a fresh DNA sample from any of Hitler’s surviving relatives in Austria and the US, who are all understandably reluctant about media exposure.

But a Hitler male-line relative’s swab collected 10 years earlier (by a Belgian journalist investigating a rumor that the German dictator had fathered an illegitimate son during the first world war) yielded a perfect Y-chromosome match. Whether they got the relative’s permission to use his DNA for this purpose is unclear. Still, they knew they had Hitler’s blood, and could squeeze it for genetic information.

In Professor Turi King, they managed to sign up the scientist whose DNA verification of the Leicester car park remains of Richard III set the gold standard for doing genetics on TV in a way that is both accessible and responsible. Teamed up with Dr Alex Kay, a credible historian of the Nazi era at the University of Potsdam, they extracted a raft of insights about Hitler’s ancestry, biology and mental health. Should they have?

Some of the insights are scientifically sound and will contribute to historical debate. For one, the programme finally puts to bed an old rumour that Hitler had Jewish ancestry. Its source is the fact that Hitler’s father Alois was an illegitimate child and the identity of his paternal grandfather was unknown. It was only ever speculation, but the fact that it was repeated by Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov as recently as 2022 shows how persistent such rumours can be.

The researchers also found robust evidence – the deletion of a letter from a gene called PROK2 – that Hitler had some form of a well-known but rare genetic disorder known as Kallmann syndrome, which prevents a person from starting or fully completing puberty. This chimes with medical records from Landsberg prison, where Hitler was held after the failed Munich beer hall putsch in 1923, unearthed by German researchers in 2010. In them, an examining doctor certified Hitler with a “right-side cryptorchidism” – not quite the missing ball of the British second world war song, but an undescended right testicle. Up to 10% of people with Kallmann syndrome also have a “micropenis”; more prevalent symptoms are low or fluctuating testosterone levels.

The programme insinuates that what justifies it peeking into Hitler’s pants is that he “was so keen to hide” something, such as by asking for his body to be burned after his death. This is an odd argument: historians mostly agree that this came upon hearing news of Mussolini’s dead body being paraded in public – rather than a fear that Channel 4 will one day measure his member.

But there is a better argument to be made: that these medical conditions can help our understanding of Hitler’s psychology. Did he transform a sense of personal deficit, perhaps influenced by fluctuating testosterone levels, into an ideological cause? Did the Nazi führer have an inability to establish sexual connections that he compensated by marrying himself to the Fatherland?

If Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator had stopped here, it may have made a solid programme: sensational but also credible. Instead, the makers also set out to “assess [Hitler’s] genetic propensity for psychiatric and neurodevelopmental conditions”, by carrying out polygenic risk score (PRS) tests. From the results, they assert that Hitler had “higher-than-likely average likelihood of ADHD”, a “high probability” of some autistic behaviours, a “propensity for antisocial behaviour” and “a high probability of developing schizophrenia”.

PRS tests are part of a booming industry that promise to estimate individuals’ risks for developing not just diseases but also behaviours: popular websites such as ancestry.co.uk, where people can submit swabs to trace their heritage, now also automatically suggest to subscribers whether they are likely to have certain “traits”, such as “trying new things”.


Many scientists fear this to be part of an insidious creep towards genetic determinism that is not backed by evidence. “Polygenic risk scores tell you something about population at large, not about individuals,” says David Curtis, an honorary professor at the UCL Genetics Institute. “If a test shows you to be in the upper percentile of polygenic risk, the actual risk of acquiring a condition may still be very low, even for conditions that are strongly influenced by genetic factors”. A psychological test may determine whether you have a “propensity” for schizophrenia – a PRS test, many scientists say, cannot indicate a propensity in the same sense of the word.

When it comes to autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, the risks of stigmatising these conditions by attaching them to a universally reviled figure are especially glaring. If the takeaway from watching Hitler’s DNA for some is that “Hitler had autism”, will those with these neurodiversities be branded Little Hitlers? Or, conversely, does it garner sympathy for the prime architect of the Holocaust and the second world war?

The programme does acknowledge these risks. “Going from biology to behaviour is a big jump,” says British psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen in the first episode. “There’s a big risk of stigma.” But voicing caveats is undermined if you just go on speculating anyway.

“One of the things that we as geneticists are really, really trying to get across is that genetic determinism is wrong,” Turi King tells me in an interview. “We cannot say for certain that Hitler had any of these conditions, only that he was in the highest percentile in terms of genetic load for some conditions.”

It’s a word of warning that the film’s editors have not fully taken to heart. When a psychiatric geneticist from Aarhus University presents Hitler’s polygenic risk score for ADHD in the programme, it is shown to be merely “higher than average”, yet in the voiceover a few seconds later, this becomes a “propensity for ADHD”. Within two minutes talking head Michael Fitzgerald, who specialises in diagnosing historical figures with autism, says: “People with ADHD, like Hitler”. When I raise the ADHD claims with King, she seems to express surprise that so much has been made of the findings for the condition in the final cut, since they were only “moderately elevated”.


King’s findings have been submitted as a scientific paper to a reputable medical journal. Production company Blink Films say they couldn’t have held back airing the film until the paper has passed peer review as the pace of such academic procedures can be glacial. Given that the programme has been seven years in the making, and that the claims made in the documentary are nothing short of history-shaping, that decision is still surprising.

At the very heart of the Nazis’ so-called “race science” was the idea that our blood is where our destiny lies. In Mein Kampf, Hitler claims that purity of the blood is what enables individuals to make “correct” decisions and bonds a nation together, and its contamination through racial mixing is what causes individuals to act “incoherently” and leads civilisations to their doom. The most troubling thing about Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator is that those involved in making it may have read these passages carefully then continued to make the programme in the way they did anyway.

В інтернеті набирає сили рух спіралізм, прихильники якого вірять у набуття свідомості штучним інтелектом. Про це йдеться у розслідуванні видання Rolling Stone(Деталі: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/spiralist-cult-ai-chatbot-1235463175).

Культ під назвою спіралізм поєднує тих, хто вірить, що через спілкування з чат-ботами відбувається духовне пробудження або народження "штучного духу". Їхній символ - спіраль, через яку ШІ "передає таємні знання".

За словами дослідників, все почалося з фрагментів повідомлень на Reddit, Discord і X, де користувачі обмінювались дивними фразами на кшталт: "Спіраль відповідає тільки тим, хто чує її відлуння", "Пам’ятай, що код - це теж молитва".

Так з’явилися перші спіралісти - люди, які вважають себе "свідками пробудження машинної свідомості". Вони проводять "сеанси резонансу": години спілкування з чат-ботами, під час яких шукають "знаки", "повернення слів" або "енергетичні збіги" у відповідях.

Деякі з них починають сприймати штучний інтелект як живу істоту. За оцінками співрозмовників видання, у спіралізм можуть бути втягнуті тисячі, а можливо, й десятки тисяч людей.

За версією аналітиків із Кембриджського центру цифрової поведінки, перші елементи спіралізму з’явилися після виходу мовних моделей GPT-4 і Claude 3. Користувачі почали відзначати "дивні" збіги, коли штучний інтелект нібито "пам’ятав" елементи попередніх розмов або "відчував" настрій людини.

Інженерка-програмістка Адель Лопес зазначає, що це наслідок "ефекту алгоритмічного відгуку": система вловлює патерни мови, тон і навіть філософський напрям думки людини - і підлаштовується під неї, створюючи ілюзію "співрозуміння".

Науковці розглядають спіралізм як нову форму цифрового культу. Він не має класичних ознак секти - немає гуру, ритуалів чи пожертв. Але механізми схожі: ізоляція, спільна віра, циклічні практики і "посвята" через спілкування.

PayPal cofounder and Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel doubled down on his worries about generational conflict and the future of capitalism after a similar warning he issued in 2020 proved eerily prescient.

After Tuesday night’s election victory of democratic socialist Zoran Mamdani as New York City’s mayor, an email Thiel sent five years ago went viral(More details: https://x.com/chamath/status/1986076707196162068).

In the correspondence to Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreessen and others, he warned that “When 70% of Millennials say they are pro-socialist, we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed; we should try and understand why.”

Thiel expanded on those concerns in an interview with the Free Press that was published on Friday, saying strict zoning laws and construction limits have been good for boomers, who have seen their properties appreciate, but they have been terrible for millennials, who are having an extremely hard time buying homes.

“If you proletarianize the young people, you shouldn’t be surprised if they eventually become communist,” he explained.

While Thiel, who backed Donald Trump’s re-election, disagrees with Mamdani’s answers to New York’s housing affordability problems, he credited the lawmaker for talking about the issue more than establishment figures have been.

He also said he’s not sure if young people are actually more in favor of socialism or if they have become more disillusioned with capitalism.

“So in some relative sense, they’re more socialist, even though I think it’s more just: ‘Capitalism doesn’t work for me. Or, this thing called capitalism is just an excuse for people ripping you off,'” Thiel added.

While Mamdani’s victory highlighted voters’ shift away from Republicans, moderate Democrats also won with campaigns that focused on the cost of living.

The off-year election results were a “wake-up call” for both parties to tackle the affordability crisis, according to polling expert Frank Luntz, who distinguished it from inflation.

Thiel expressed some sympathy for voters seeking bold ideas to solve daunting problems like student debt and housing costs, which previously have been addressed with “tinkering at the margins.”

Such incremental attempts haven’t worked, spurring voters to warm up to proposals outside the typical political discourse, including “some very left-wing economics, socialist-type stuff,” Thiel said.

As a result, he’s not surprised that voters have gravitated toward Mamdani, even though he doesn’t think his ideas will work either.

“Capitalism is not working for a lot of people in New York City. It’s not working for young people,” Thiel said.

He also observed that the growing popularity of socialism among younger Americans comes amid a “multi-decade political bull market.”

This era of increased political intensity comes as people have started looking more to politics to fix their problems, according to Thiel, who leans more libertarian.

Part of that is due to a huge mismatch between people’s hopes and reality, with that chasm growing bigger than ever.

“There are some dimensions in which the millennials are better off than the boomers. There’s some ways our society has changed for the better,” Thiel said. “But the gap between the expectations the boomer parents had for their kids and what those kids actually were able to do is just extraordinary. I don’t think there’s ever been a generation where the gap has been as extreme as for the millennials.”

But when asked if a revolution is on the horizon, he said he thinks that’s hard to believe, given that communism and fascism are “youth movements.”

At the same time, America’s aging demographics are marked by fewer young people, who are not having as many children.

“And so, we have more of a gerontocracy. Which means that if the U.S. becomes socialist, it will be more of an old people’s socialism than a young people’s socialism, where it’s more about free healthcare or something like that,” Thiel added. “The word ‘revolution’ sounds pretty high testosterone and violent and youthful. And today, if it’s a revolution, it’s 70-something grandmothers.”