"Can you" as in "are you able to" or "should you"?
Anyway, yes on both counts personally. It's like reviewing resumes with identifiers removed.
Otherwise, one would be judging the content with preconceived bias. IMO it's a slippery slope to, and belong in the same subset as, so many other identity-related issues in society e.g. tribalism, identity-based politics, discriminition based on identities like race, etc
I find that the trick - or at least the idea - isn't to go out of the way to avoid such political discussions; it is to seek out spaces with some niche interest. Discussions would then naturally gravitate around the topic of interest, and political discussion usually doesn't make sense in such a space.
An example topic is anime. Most anime are not political in nature, so commenters in ani.social don't have the chance to go off-topic and discuss politics.
To use an analogy, let's say you are a picky eater. You are given some food (think soup, salad, etc), but one of its ingredients is something you don't like. Rather than try to pick out that one ingredient you dislike bit by bit (which can be tedious), how about adding condiments / dressing / etc to the dish? Enough of those and the taste would change, with the newly-added tastes having overpowered the one you dislike.
In terms of implementation, you basically have to curate your feed somehow. On Lemmy, the straightforward way to do so is to subscribe to topics / communities you are interested in, and participate in just those.
I started with lemmy.world, the biggest generalist instance, for an easy starting point. I thought I would be interacting in programming and anime threads.
In the end, I end up discussing mostly weeb stuff, so ani.social looks more appropriate.
Also, I don't know the specifics, but if ani.social triggered lemmy.ml enough for lemmy.ml to defederate from ani.social, it must be doing something right.
In my experience, the instance and community moderators of ani.social are based. I barely see any drama unlike some other instances. I'd say I chose well.
AI is a super broad field that encompasses so many tech. It is not limited to the whatever the tech CEOs are pushing.
In this comment section alone, we see a couple examples of AI used in practical ways.
On a more personal level, surely you'd have played video games before? If you had to face any monster / bot opponents / etc, those are all considered AI. Depending on the game, stages / maps / environments may be procedurally generated - using AI techniques!
There are many more examples - e.g. pathfinding in map apps, translation apps -, just that we are all so familiar with them that we stopped thinking of them as AI.
So there are plenty of evidence for AI's usefulness.
