CONCEPT
Question Engineering
The discipline of formulating a question such that a capable answering system produces a useful answer. Asimov's Multivac stories prefigured it; prompt engineering operationalizes it.
Question engineering is the discipline of formulating a question such that a capable answering system produces a useful answer. When answers are expensive, the bottleneck is producing them. When answers are cheap (as in the LLM era), the bottleneck is in formulating questions that yield answers worth having. Isaac Asimov's Multivac stories are the first fictional treatment of the pattern; contemporary prompt engineering is the applied discipline.
In The You On AI Field Guide
This is probably the single most undervalued practical skill of the AI era. The person who knows how to ask a language model gets useful outputs; the person who does not gets generic outputs. The gap between the two is widening, and it maps onto existing educational and professional divides in ways that are just beginning to be studied.
The Multivac stories — "Franchise" (1955), "The Last Question" (1956), "The Machine that Won the War" (1961) — all turn on the same insight: a sufficiently capable answering machine is bottlenecked by the human