Author: Kristie Wells
A free public symposium at St. Patrick’s Episcopal Church will bring together leaders in technology, business, law and faith to explore how artificial intelligence is already changing our lives, where it may be headed and how we can learn to use it wisely.
You don’t need to be an engineer to have questions about artificial intelligence. At this point, you probably just need to be a person.
In a remarkably short period of time, artificial intelligence (AI) has moved from something that sounded futuristic to something millions of people use every day. We ask AI to write emails, summarize documents, plan trips, analyze data, create images, translate languages, help with homework, write computer code and explain subjects we know little about.
And even if you have never intentionally opened ChatGPT, Claude or another generative AI tool, artificial intelligence is already woven into many of the products and services you use.
It helps determine what appears in your online searches and social media feeds. Businesses use it for customer service, marketing, fraud detection and data analysis. Financial institutions use machine learning to identify suspicious transactions. Employers are incorporating AI into workplace software. Search engines increasingly provide AI-generated answers instead of simply directing us to websites.
AI is not coming. It is here. The more important questions now are how we use it, how we protect ourselves from its risks, and how much responsibility we are willing to hand over to machines.
Those questions will be at the center of What AI Means for Us, Now and Next, a free public symposium being held Saturday, October 3rd, at St. Patrick’s Episcopal Church in Incline Village, NV.
The half-day program brings together engineers, entrepreneurs, legal and business leaders, and people of faith for a conversation about where artificial intelligence is today, where it is going and what it could mean for the rest of us.
Learning to Live With AI
There are good reasons to be excited about artificial intelligence. Used well, AI can be an extraordinary tool.
It can help someone understand a complicated subject, compare large amounts of information, brainstorm ideas, improve writing, learn a new skill or tackle a problem they might not otherwise know how to approach.
For small businesses and independent professionals, the implications are particularly significant. Tasks that once required substantial time, specialized knowledge or additional staff can increasingly be assisted by AI.
But learning how to use AI also means learning when not to trust it.
Generative AI systems can produce information that sounds authoritative and is completely wrong. They can reflect biases contained in their training data or introduced through the way a question is asked. Information entered into an AI system can create privacy, confidentiality or intellectual-property concerns depending on the system and its settings.
And AI is making it increasingly difficult to trust what we see and hear online.
An image can be created without a camera. A person’s voice can be convincingly cloned. Video can be manipulated. Emails and text messages can be generated at enormous scale and tailored to sound remarkably personal.
That means AI literacy isn’t simply about learning how to write a good prompt. It is also about learning to verify information, protect sensitive data, recognize manipulation and understand when human judgment still matters.
- A retiree trying to determine whether a frantic phone call really came from a grandchild has an AI problem.
- A local business deciding whether confidential customer information should be entered into an AI system has an AI problem.
- A parent wondering how AI should fit into a child’s education has an AI problem.
- A professional trying to determine whether AI-generated work belongs to them, their employer or someone else may have an AI problem too.
These are no longer hypothetical Silicon Valley questions. They are everyday questions.
From Engineering to Ethics
The symposium begins with a welcome from The Very Rev. Marla Asson, Rector of St. Patrick’s Episcopal Church, before moving into two panel discussions.
The first, “Where do we see AI today? Who should we listen to?”, will be moderated by Lake Tahoe TV reporter Kristen Miller. The panel brings together three people approaching artificial intelligence from very different directions.
- Jay Duluk, Senior Distinguished Engineer at NVIDIA, brings the engineering perspective from a company at the center of the infrastructure powering the current AI boom.
- Chris Heuer, an entrepreneur, author and host of CommunityAssistant.ai, has spent decades working at the intersection of technology and human communities. His current work explores how AI can support communities and organizations while also asking an important question: What should technology handle, and what needs to remain fundamentally human? Trust, relationships, judgment and conflict resolution become particularly interesting subjects when machines can increasingly participate in conversations that once occurred exclusively between people.
- Jeff Sheldon brings the legal perspective, particularly around patents and intellectual property. As AI becomes involved in writing, designing, inventing and creating, questions about ownership and authorship are becoming increasingly complicated. Who owns an idea developed with the assistance of artificial intelligence? What information is safe to share with an AI system? What happens when AI produces something based partly on material created by somebody else? These aren’t abstract questions for attorneys to sort out someday. Businesses and individuals are already confronting them.
Where Is AI Going?
The second panel, “Where is AI going? What can we expect?”, will be moderated by William Bryan, Ph.D.
Panelists include:
- Jen Elena Romano, CEO of CURA, brings a workforce and human-development perspective to the conversation. CURA focuses on early-career coaching and development, an area where AI raises some fascinating questions. What skills will matter in an AI-assisted workplace? What happens to entry-level jobs when technology can perform some of the work traditionally assigned to people beginning their careers? And perhaps most importantly, what human skills become more valuable when machines can handle more of the technical work?
- Puneet Kalia, CEO of Kategos AI approaches the issue from the business side. His work with Kategos AI focuses on implementing artificial intelligence within organizations, where the conversation quickly moves beyond impressive demonstrations to practical questions involving data, infrastructure, security, cost, risk and actual business value. That distinction matters. There is a considerable difference between experimenting with an AI chatbot and integrating artificial intelligence into the systems a business relies upon.
- Fr. Brendan McGuire, pastor of St. Simon Catholic Parish in Los Altos, California, whose background makes him an unusual bridge between technology and faith. Before entering the priesthood, McGuire worked as an engineer and technology executive in Silicon Valley. He holds degrees in engineering and computer science and completed Stanford University’s executive business program. He has also participated in discussions surrounding the ethical frameworks used by AI systems, bringing him directly into one of the most difficult questions surrounding this technology.
What Should We Ask AI to Do?
It may ultimately be one of the most consequential questions surrounding artificial intelligence.
For years, much of the conversation about technology has focused on capability.
- Can a computer recognize a face?
- Can it drive a car?
- Can it diagnose a disease?
- Can it write an essay?
- Can it create a photograph that never existed?
- Can it hold a convincing conversation?
Increasingly, the answer to many of those questions is yes, or at least “not perfectly, but surprisingly well.” That changes the conversation.
The most important question may no longer be what AI can do. It may be what we should ask it to do, what we should never hand over to it, and whether we understand the difference.
Should an AI system make a medical decision? Screen a job applicant? Decide whether someone receives a loan? Teach a child? Provide companionship to someone who is lonely? Write our news? Make decisions for a government? There may not be simple answers. That is precisely why conversations like this matter.
You Don’t Have to Be an AI Expert
Perhaps the most important thing to understand about the October 3rd symposium is that it isn’t intended only for people who work in technology.
You don’t need to understand neural networks, large language models or computer programming to participate. In fact, people who feel as though artificial intelligence is developing faster than they can keep up may have the most to gain from the conversation.
None of us needs to become an AI engineer, but we probably do need to understand enough to ask better questions.
We need to know when AI can genuinely make our lives easier and when using it introduces unnecessary risk. We need to understand what information we should protect. We need to become more skeptical consumers of digital information. And we need to recognize that an answer delivered confidently by a computer is not necessarily a correct answer.
AI literacy may eventually become as fundamental as learning how to navigate the internet was a generation ago.
The technology will continue changing, probably faster than most of us can comfortably follow.
The challenge for the rest of us is to understand enough to use it intelligently, benefit from what it can do, recognize what it cannot do and protect ourselves from the ways it can be misused.
On October 3rd, Incline Village has an opportunity to start that conversation together.
What AI Means for Us, Now and Next
Saturday, October 3, 2026
8:00 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.
Registration and continental breakfast begin at 7:30 a.m.
Community Room at St. Patrick’s Episcopal Church
341 Village Blvd.
Incline Village, Nevada
The symposium is free and offered as a service to the community. Continental breakfast and lunch will be provided.
Seating is limited to 50 people and advance registration is required. Register through Eventbrite: eventbrite.com/e/2001417984067
For questions, contact St. Patrick’s Episcopal Church at 775-831-1418.