I'm getting tired of this site. It's supposed to be a factual site about software development and stuff. But 90% of the questions are sci-fi/fantasy questions like "If AI becomes sentient.......". The word "consciousness" does not refer to any scientifically definable concept. The answer is what ever you want it to be. What are the guide lines for this forum? are these questions even on topic? – Lorry Laurence mcLarry 8 hours ago
I share Lorry's distaste of these type of questions. Speculative questions are easy to ask, easy to answer, and easy to engage with, but they don't necessarily help humans to truly understand the field of AI (especially since many of these speculative questions are not really answerable within a reasonable timeframe). Speculative questions also might degrade into opinion-based questions, which is an obvious no-no. Many of these questions have the potential to be unanswerable.
It's not like these questions are bad. AI and science-fiction have been closely connected to each other, and people do want to speculate about the future. The scope of the site is to answer "conceptual questions about life and challenges in a world where 'cognitive' functions can be mimicked in purely digital environment", which seems to suggest that these types of speculative questions might be on-topic.
However, I don't think the site would survive if we were flooded by them.
Non-speculative humanities questions about AI are difficult to come up with and difficult to answer, but they seem to be more useful and applicable in the present-day. I think this is the type of content we want to have...
What can be done to encourage people to ask the latter type of questions?