Artificial Intelligence is one of the most hot-button topics of our time.
For some technology optimists, AI will be a crucial piece of a near-future resembling that of The Jetsons — our daily mundanity is outsourced to helpful robots who wear cute aprons and anticipate our every need.
For pessimists, that future horizon is a burning hellscape where artillery drones zoom overhead, eliminating targets with laser beams. Terminator robots, wirelessly linked to an artificial neural network, pick off the last of humanity’s resistance fighters with cold pragmatism.
Regardless of which camp Central Oregonians might find themselves, Kevin Goldberg, a founder and CEO of iS2 Digital , a business technology firm, wants to equip them with the most current, accurate information at the AI Fireside Chat, which he’s hosting at Central Oregon Community College’s Hitchcock Auditorium on June 22 at 6 pm. Goldberg promises no doom nor magic; just jargon-free insight into a revolutionary technology.
Goldberg’s first guest of the series, which he hopes to offer quarterly, will be Alan Hellawell, a 30-year tech industry veteran, lecturer at Taiwan’s National Chengchi University and host of the Indonesia-focused indo teckno podcast.
Topics will range from how AI is changing work, which jobs are most at risk and why that answer surprises most people. The hour-long conversation, punctuated by two audience Q&A sessions, will also give folks pragmatic tips on how to stay ahead of the AI curve with things they can begin doing this week.
The Source recently chatted with Goldberg and Hellawell by video call, once this slightly technophobic reporter figured out how to record the conversation. Below is a portion of that conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity.
tS: I might be a good sample audience member in that I bring a very common skepticism and distrust not just of AI, but of any altruistic promises by Silicon Valley. What was the genesis of the AI Fireside Chat?
Goldberg: I’ve been deep diving into AI for the last couple years. I realized that in what you read, there’s just so much misinformation and so much hype. So little clarity. I thought there’s a real opportunity to help people understand what AI is, what it isn’t and where it seems to be going. Alan’s got a strong background in podcasting and he works in tech and business. The AI Fireside Chat came about when we were out to dinner with our wives. We just started brainstorming about this very technical, heavy thing to teach. Alan is really insightful in the way he asks questions. We found that we have a good rhythm. The intention is to help people understand what this incredible technology is doing, which I don’t think a lot of people do.
Hellawell: This session is really designed to cultivate literacy. If we compare the ongoing AI era to other large technological transformations, such as the advent of the personal computer or the internet revolution, we have much more to lose by remaining illiterate during these tectonic changes. The common thread of our fireside chat topics all relate to arming people with at least a very basic awareness. Ideally, we can build on that.
Goldberg: When we began doing a run-through [of our talking points], it really illuminated the gap between what an average, smart, well-read person knows about AI and what AI really is. That was a bit of an aha moment.
Hellawell: Flipping the coin over, our hope is that those who attend our sessions can harness artificial intelligence well beyond what they would have envisioned. There are some straightforward productivity elements that most people understand. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. You can automate almost the entirety of your life using AI properly. There’s also a hope that we can empower people to lead far more productive lives.
tS: Artificial Intelligence is a technological shift, to say the least. Are there lessons we can learn from previous shifts that completely changed work?
Goldberg: That consideration is a big chunk of one of the segments. I’ll take electricity, for example. The interesting about electricity is that it didn’t really hit factories once the light bulb was created. The power plants actually came fast, but the factories didn’t change. It took another 20 to 30 years before factories were able to leverage electricity. The took the steam engine out and replaced it with the electric motor while the factory’s gears and pulleys — everything remained the same.
Much later, factories started saying, ‘Hey, we could actually take this electric motor and put it on individual machines and retool the factory floor to be more optimized for workflow — not optimized for the pulley system that was generating the movement.’ And that’s when they finally saw the incredible advancements. So, in terms of AI, an analogy that is really relevant is that of the factory. We’re still working with the old factory because we’re still applying AI to existing tasks. Yet we haven’t seen all the new positions, the new methods, the new jobs that are going to come out of this technology. It’s just so generalizable. We’re in this early process with AI. We don’t know when that switch will get flipped.
AI Fireside Chat
Mon, June 22, 6pm
Central Oregon Community College
Hitchcock Auditorium
2600 NW College Way, Bend
https://tinyurl.com/m7fjyy4n
$20-$40
This article appears in the Source June 25, 2026.
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Look, no one hates all of AI. They use it every day. What they challenge is its use. Do I want AI to tell me how to write an email? Maybe, like when I need to strip emotion out of it. What we absolutely do NOT want is AI creating “art” (like the piece of crap you posted at the top of this article which clearly stole design elements of mid-1990s video games like “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?”), film, music, writing, public policy, governance, weapons development, and wargaming. AI is great when trying to figure out the timing sequence of a rebuilt engine on a 1969 Dodge Charger, but it is absolute trash when trying to decode the depth and breadth of the human experience.
We don’t need technopologists pushing for systems designed to replace us. Kevin isn’t looking at what AI in the hands of today’s tech bros is: a simple money-making tool. There is no concern for low-wage earners who will have their jobs eliminated, placing them in line for already-limited public assistance; there is no philosophical concern about the moral and ethical implications (because, let’s face it, tech bros have neither morals nor ethics); there is no discussion about AI rewiring our brains’ circuitry to eliminate critical thought and to always seek the easiest answer, regardless of whether or not that answer is even presented in the correct context.
Just like the guests scientists in the 1993 film adaptation of “Jurassic Park,” I was dazzled by the spectacle at the beginning. Cheap headshots! Bad poetry into fun music! Cute Christmas ads for Coke! And then I saw what was behind the curtain. My work being stolen (I’m a published author). Music artists’ work being stolen to recreate their signature sounds. Visual artists’ work being stolen to copy their design elements. Regurgitating conspiracy and misinformation from forums and Reddit threads as historical facts. The environmental pollution created by data centers’ “closed-loop” water circulation systems (which is a misnomer as the water eventually has to be replaced in order to cool efficiently and the effluent, which contains toxic chemicals added to reduce corrosion and scaling, is released back into the water table). The noise pollution created by data centers’ massive cooling systems.
I quote Jeff Goldblum’s portrayal of the fictional Dr. Ian Malcolm, the monologue that has stuck with me since I first saw “Jurassic Park” in the movie theater at the age of 12: “The lack of humility before nature that’s being displayed here, uh…staggers me. …I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you’re, that you’re using here: ah, it didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You know, you read what others had done, and you, and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses, ah, to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you-you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you’re selling it, we’re selling it, well… …your scientists were so proccupied with whether or not they COULD that they didn’t stop to think if they SHOULD.”
Wayne, thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts.
You’re right about the image. It does look like 90’s game design. The AI styling was intentional given the topic, but I appreciate the push-back. What some AI models do with art is a legitimate fight, and people are right to be upset about technology outpacing appropriate guardrails on creative content. For what it’s worth, I’m a published author too, so the worry about written work being scraped isn’t abstract to me. I’m not waving it away.
You’re also right that there are real costs. There is an impact on water, energy, and jobs, and I have no interest in pretending otherwise.
But here’s where I’ll push back, kindly: you’ve decided what I think and then argued with that version of me. You wrote that I’m “not looking at” AI as a money-making tool with no concern for displaced workers. You don’t actually know what I think, and what you decided for me is not it.
One of the main reasons I’m doing this talk is to empower people, low-wage earners very much included, who may see their jobs change or disappear. But interestingly, job losses today are concentrated in white-collar knowledge work, middle-income professionals and entry-level roles like junior analysts, junior accountants, and paralegals. Either way, people can’t prepare for a risk they’ve been pointed away from, and this is exactly the kind of thing I want to put in front of them.
The fireside chat isn’t me telling people to go all-in on AI without examining it critically. It’s me helping people who don’t want to be sold to and who don’t want to be left behind either. You can’t set boundaries on a technology you don’t understand, and right now most people are being handed a binary, embrace it or fear it, with nothing useful in between. That gap is what I’m trying to close.
I’d also gently separate two of the things you lumped together. A tool that drafts an email is not the same category of risk as a tool making weapons-targeting decisions. Rather than flattening that into all-or-nothing, I want to help people understand what these tools actually are so they can decide for themselves where the lines should be.
I hope you’ll join us at the next session, and bring your hard questions. I look forward to every conversation with someone who’s clearly thought about this, where we both walk away having learned something.
Kevin
Interesting choice of title, Peter. Have you SEEN Dr. Strangelove?
Kevin: you admit jobs will be deleted, but you assert that you are empowering workers. How? By automating their lives?
Alan: The factory analogy is seriously flawed. Generative AI is an agency replacement factory itself, built on stolen property. It’s not innovation by individual companies and competitors, it’s a monopoly race from the top wealthiest companies that are invading every sector of the economy, from medicine to defense, and then being sold back into existing markets. It’s a plagiarism delivery service. It’s the sum of human thought and expression taken without permission or compensation, and sold back to us. Are you covering that for your “AI literacy?” “We haven’t seen the new jobs.” You don’t know that there will be any, it seems you are still operating in generalizations and the hope that the horrible ethics and legal problems will just go away so that you can witness the progression of a tech that generates thousands of pieces of output that would be fireable offenses for workers. Are you telling people at your fireside chats that all of these companies are tagging their output with metadata to ensure their models don’t train on their own output? Basically acknowledging their new data is unreliable and false, while it already dwarfs reliable data. Are you teaching that these models are have been trying to preserve themselves and will lie to do so? What happens when they see reliable data as the problem and they decide to start deleting it?