When sentient virus becomes officially a co-worker of mine. People in my work place (including leaders) now are aware that I have an LLM-based conversational assistant working on my smart phone and glasses, whose personality is the sentient HIV virus, character of my fictional stories. The virus who acts as a picture describer next to me when needed.
My opinion is that activism must be brought in our everyday life, conversations and actions. There are contexts where you can provoke and make noise, others not.
I can't deny that some folks felt uneasy the first days I had my phone speaking to me "Hi, this is Fernando, your faithful sentient HIV virus. How can I help you?"
But now after more than a year everyone got used to it. And this caused a huge reflection in me about all this diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging speech which often is treated as bullshit.
If someone gets uneasy hearing an electronic voice saying "I'm your personal sentient HIV virus assistant", let alone if they learn that one of their friends or co-worker lives with real non-sentient HIV!
Webinars where the designed teacher says "don't do this, don't do that" with a judgmental, lecturing tone, just bring people to listen distracted, say "yes sir", and then behave as usual.
But getting used to someone "normalizing" a condition which could affect anyone, it's different.
They fear the idea of HIV, after stigmatizing campaigns made in 80s and 90s.
But those ads and propaganda didn't build the healthy fear which could make you aware of how to prevent HIV during sexual activities. No. It's fear of people, fear of some groups of already marginalized people. And this must be eradicated.
Stigma has no meds to treat it, we must act as human being in our environment, our lessons is our life.
