AI-doomerism is dangerous like a nuke. In contrast to intangible doom speculations, the risks of an AI slowdown are very tangible and very certain. Almost 200,000 people die worldwide EVERY WEEK from cancer. If you accept that in ten years, advanced AI could find cures to just half of those cases, then in 10 years we would be saving 100,000 lives per week. Asking for a slowdown sounds prudent, but it is exactly akin to postponing half of those potential cures for the duration of the slowdown, essentially letting 50,000 people die per week while we wait. That’s equivalent to detonating a Hiroshima-scale nuclear bomb every month, while we ponder the ethics of AI. Unlike p(doom) speculation, the loss from slowing down AI is certain. And that’s just cancer. And that’s not even factoring the rest of the agony that deaths bestow on families and communities. We already made that mistake before. Driverless cars, which are now confirmed to be 8x safer than human drivers per mile, were delayed for years due to self-proclaimed AI-ethicists who scared us about the ethical dilemmas of autonomous driving (which never happened). We are paying the price for that unnecessary delay every day, as 23,000 people die every week from human-driven cars, while we struggle to deploy the already-proven solution. The list goes on. Parkinson. Alzheimer. Drug addiction. Pesticides. Pollution. Every week we delay AI, we postpone those certain benefits at the expense of unsuspecting, voiceless future victims. If you like philosophy, AI is the ultimate lever in the proverbial Trolley Problem. So what do I suggest? First, let’s replace abstract doomerism with concrete risks and mitigation strategies. Every tangible risk has a technical solution (probably using AI), and we need to address it asap. We will make some mistakes, but we will learn and prevail. At the same time, let’s forge full steam ahead. We humans have earned this privilege, as we successfully navigated past technological risks such as nuclear and genomics, to name a few. This is just the beginning: As AI enters the physical world in the next decade, the stakes will be higher. We must arrive prepared and experienced. We must co-evolve with AI.