Making plans for the apocalypse

Today, my wife and I discussed the apocalypse. 

Until today, I assumed she was merely humoring me: yes, I can spend my free time on this "saving the world" fantasy if that's what I want, as long as I still have time left over for installing this IKEA shelf and grating the cheese. 

Today, she made an off hand comment about how the post-apocalypse world was going to be so annoying. Huh, when I think about the upcoming AI uprising, "annoying" is not the first word which comes to mind. So I asked her how she pictures the apocalypse.

It turns out she has a detailed plan. 

Don't raid the grocery store. Too dangerous, people are going to fight dirty. Focus on joining or building a tribe, find strength in numbers. Go through the neighborhood, release the pets trapped in closed apartments with a rotting corpse. Help survivors. Build a reputation, become invaluable, gain influence. Monitor the other tribe members. Cut them out at the earliest signs of cheating or conflict, there's no room for that. One less mouth to feed. Gotta make your own justice, there's no police anymore.

A good location for a base. Enough room to stockpile the food. A door with a physical lock, can't be an apartment complex because the intercom won't open the door. A fireplace for warmth, can't rely on plinth heaters. Near a forest, for foraging, setting traps, and wood.

The list of tools we're going to need, which ones to give up if our carrying capacity is limited. Which of our acquaintances have key survival skills, like hunting. Social media might still work for a short while, we should contact them, set a rendez-vous point. The cold, objectively-sorted priority list of who we should contact first when trying to figure out who is still alive.

Turns out my wife would be a really good survivor. I haven't thought about any of this. I am concerned enough to work on preventing the end of the world, one alignment prototype at a time, but not enough to actually seriously consider what happens if that fails. Too scary to think about, honestly.

I don't think there's going to be a crowd fighting at the grocery store. I think most of us will be caught off guard, completely unprepared, unable to quite grasp that ordering pizza is not a viable strategy for securing food.

Most of the survivors, I mean. Most of us will be dead, of course.