“As goes popular imagination, so goes belief, and so goes behavior. Which fictions we choose to elevate matters. I want to draw especial attention to the treatment of AI—artificial intelligence—in these narratives. Think of Ex Machina or Blade Runner. I spoke at TED two years in a row, and one year, there were back-to-back talks about whether or not AI was going to evolve out of control and “kill us all.” I realized that that scenario is just something I have never been afraid of. And at the same moment, I noticed that the people who are terrified of machine super-intelligence are almost exclusively white men. I don’t think anxiety about AI is really about AI at all. I think it’s certain white men’s displaced anxiety upon realizing that women and people of color have, and have always had, sentience, and are beginning to act on it on scales that they’re unprepared for. There’s a reason that AI is almost exclusively gendered as female, in fiction and in life. There’s a reason they’re almost exclusively in service positions, in fiction and in life. I’m not worried about how we’re going to treat AI some distant day, I’m worried about how we treat other humans, now, today, all over the world, far worse than anything that’s depicted in AI movies. It matters that still, the vast majority of science fiction narratives that appear in popular culture are imagined by, written by, directed by, and funded by white men who interpret the crumbling of their world as the crumbling of the world.”

• Wash the dishes in your sink
• Get your outfit for tomorrow together, including accessories
• Set up coffee/tea/breakfast
• Make your lunch
• Put your keys somewhere obvious
• Wash your face and brush your teeth
• Take your medication/set out your meds for the morning
• Charge your electronics
• Pour a little cleaner in the toilet bowl (if you don’t have pets or children or sleepwalking adults)
• Set your alarm
• Go to bed at a reasonable hour