How to prepare for an AI apocalypse without becoming a prepper

The phrase covers two completely different questions wearing the same coat. One is civilisational and unanswerable at household scale. The other is a bad week, and a bad week is plannable.

Nothing below assumes AI will cause any particular failure. It probably won't cause most of them. The reason this list is worth twenty minutes is that every item on it has been caused repeatedly by storms, contractors with backhoes, expired cards, dead batteries, and ordinary human error — so the preparation pays for itself regardless of which story turns out to be the relevant one.

Run down this list and notice how many of them depend on a single device, a single account, or a single person's memory. That concentration is the real vulnerability, and it is the one nobody notices until it matters.

Most of these are tasks, not purchases. The first four cost nothing and take an evening.

Write down, on paper, six phone numbers and one out-of-area contact. Put a copy in a wallet and one on the refrigerator. Charge the power bank tonight, then put it back where you'll find it in the dark. Download offline copies of your essential documents to the device itself, not just the account. Agree one meeting place near home and one further away, and say both out loud to everyone who lives there.

Then the verification piece. The FBI recommends agreeing a secret word or phrase with your family so an unexpected call claiming to be a relative in crisis can be checked. Pair it with a rule that survives panic: hang up and call the person back on the number you already have.

Keep some cash. Not a survivalist quantity; enough for a few days of the things you'd normally tap a card for. Know where your water shut-off is. Keep one flashlight that is not your phone.

This part matters as much as the list above, because the failure mode for a worried person isn't doing nothing. It's doing the expensive, dramatic version of nothing.

A plan that lives in one adult's head is not a household plan, it's a single point of failure who might be at work, asleep, or the person everyone is trying to reach. The same applies to a plan that lives in a notes app on the phone that's dead.

Written down means paper, or a file on the device itself, in a place the other people in your home already know about. That's the entire standard. It is much lower than people assume, and almost nobody clears it.

Everything above can be done in an evening, for free, from this page. Some people prefer a structure that asks the questions in order and gives them something to stick on the refrigerator at the end. The station sells two, and neither of them protects anyone from AI — they just get the ordinary decisions out of your head and onto paper.