> It's not totally known what effect an EMP would have on stuff

Sandia wrote a report called, "Did High-Altitude EMP Cause the Hawaiian Streetlight Incident?" - http://ece-research.unm.edu/summa/notes/SDAN/0031.pdf

There's probably a hyper detailed classified study sitting somewhere in a dusty drawer with that data that should probably be declassified. If you'd be down to FOIA it, I'd love to read it!

    > With how quickly AI is going basically all futures are weird in some ways. I've been thinking about how this affects me personally, and "try as hard as possible to keep AI from getting us all killed" is pretty high on the list. For me this mostly looks like donations and pandemic deterrence, but I also put some time into thinking about disasters. There are ways AI might go very well, or very poorly, and then there's the "messy middle" where we muddle through and things might fall apart some in the meantime.
    > 
    > The big things here are making sure you have enough water and food for a while, along with critical medications and the standard "prepping" recommendations. But lately I've been thinking about what you might do for other risks, such as engineered pandemics, mirror bacteria, or fire suppression outages. And today, EMPs.

But based on the post, it seems that your threat model is off. The biggest threat of an EMP blast won't be your electronics acting up, but it would be the critical high voltage transformers being taken offline. These transformers have a lead time of months. Weeks in the best-case scenario.

From the congressional research service, https://sgp.fas.org/crs/homesec/R43604.pdf

     > Most HV transformers are unique and therefore are designed and manufactured to custom specifications for a specific network application. In 2010, the lead time between an HV transformer order and delivery ranged from 5 to 12 months for U.S. manufacturers and 6 to 16 months for foreign manufacturers, although lead times well over 20 months could be required in certain situations.10 This process may include three to four months for the engineering design alone.11 Since manufacturing generally occurs on a single production line with just-in-time component supplies, advanced production scheduling is important for managing delivery.
    > 
    > Physical assembly is labor intensive, requiring manual winding of the copper wire around the transformer core and frequent engineering checks during manufacturing. Extensive testing of completed units also contributes to HV transformer manufacturing time. The installed cost for an HV transformer depends heavily on its configuration and specific design requirements. 
    > 
    > New HV transmission substations can cost well in excess of $10 million, including the cost of transformers and other station equipment. According to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the factory prices for HV transformers typically range from $2 million for a 230 kV unit to $7.5 million for a 765 kV unit, before transportation and installation costs.

It's possible to do that but it's not possible to do that cheaply.

As far as contingencies for EMPs for your personal items go. You can use water as a very effective shielding medium. If you have an average sized backyard swimming pool, and if you can somehow bury something at its exact center i.e. under the pool, then a small box there would survive almost anything. Water is a really, really, really great shielding material.