‘Village Voices’ event series at Senior Center open to all
- Published: February 20, 2025
By Lauren “Chuck” Shows
The YS Senior Center is a place for seniors — and for the rest of the community, too.
That’s been the thinking behind an event series launched at the Senior Center nearly three years ago, intended to engage the community at large on topics of broad interest, presented by interesting folks with a local connection.
The “Community Colloquy” series held its first event in May 2022, when Antioch College President Jane Fernandes presented a “State of the College” address in the Senior Center’s Great Room and on Zoom to several dozen in-person and online attendees.
The event series continues this month, but with a fresh, new name: “Village Voices.”
Susan Alberter, a Senior Center board member, spoke with the News last week about both the founding of the series and the name change. She said the series was born out of a board retreat in which she and fellow board members Anna Bellisari and Diane Chiddister were discussing ways to bring audiences of all ages into the center.
“We were talking about the fact that the center could be a place anybody in the village could participate in events or be a presenter,” Alberter said. “We were hoping to develop something that might attract a few more people to come in and participate.”
Since that first event in 2022, the event series has run monthly, except in July, August and December, and programs have run the gamut with regard to focus.
“We’ve had all sorts of speakers, including Ellis Jacobs on voting rights, Kevin McGruder on the history of African American housing in YS, Jon Hudson on public sculpture, and Diane Diller and Len Kramer on working through differences with others,” board member Chiddister told the News via email last week. “We’ve had almost 30 speakers in all and never seem to run out of interesting villagers with something to talk about.”
When it came to naming the series, Alberter said the trio of board members aimed for something punchy and memorable, landing on “Community Colloquy.”
“‘Colloquy,’ meaning ‘mutual discourse,’ with ‘community’ sounded so alliterative, and that’s what we were hoping for — not just a presentation, but an exchange of ideas,” she said. “But we’ve been getting feedback from folks who ask, ‘Well, what’s a colloquy?’”
Cue the name change to “Village Voices” — just as snappy and alliterative as the series’ original title, but a little more accessible, Alberter said. The name change doesn’t indicate a change in direction for the series, however; “Village Voices” will still be focused on topics of interest from folks you might know — or, even better, might get to know.
“In March, John Fleming will talk about his Peace Corps book; in April, Desiree Nickell will talk about flowers in Shakespeare’s work; and in May, Jim Duffee will talk about what’s going on at Friends Care Community,” Alberter said. “Diane and [Senior Center Director] Caroline [Mullin] know so many people in town and their histories and varied skill sets.”
Coming up this month, on Feb. 20 — the series’ typical third Thursday of the month — will be Max Mullin, who will discuss “Demystifying AI.”
Mullin, a 2014 YS High School alumnus and data engineer who works for the Kroger-owned retail data science and insight company 84.51˚, spoke with the News this week about his upcoming “Village Voices” program.
Like most, Mullin said, he’s aware of the questions, concerns and anxieties that surround the widening common access to artificial intelligence, or AI. The first question many folks have is often: “Will AI replace me?”
“Part of what I want to talk about is tempering some expectations about AI,” Mullin said. “People worry that the bots are going to get so good at, say, programming, that we won’t need programmers — but companies are still hiring software engineers. So I think there’s a huge future promise in artificial intelligence, but what we have today, while it’s very useful … still has a pretty limited scope.”
Mullin also noted that, in a village populated by a lot of artists, there are likely concerns about how AI is being trained on existing, human-made artwork and used to produce images. It’s a complex issue that delves into both legal and ethical questions, which he aims to speak to within his presentation.
Nevertheless, Mullin said he’s excited about the possibilities AI represents, both for pragmatic daily uses and industry-specific uses.
One of the ways folks are increasingly interacting with AI is through the use of large language models, which are trained on massive amounts of text to recognize patterns in language in order to interact with users. Large language models such as Google’s PaLM 2 or ChatGPT’s GPT-4 can help users find answers to questions, summarize long chunks of text or write code.
“It’s not perfect, but it works,” Mullin said, noting that large language models are still a work-in-progress.
“Part of the power of AI is in helping distill things down to a manageable scale,” he added. “If you’re a researcher, for example, there may be tens or hundreds of papers published every week in your field, and AI can help cut down that search to the few that are really relevant to your research.”
At the same time, Mullin noted, AI is helping to break new ground in medical research; last year, a team of scientists won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work in reliably predicting protein-folding with the aid of AI. Correct protein folding is essential for bodily functions, and diseases such as Alzheimer’s and cystic fibrosis can be caused by misfolded proteins.
In the past, discovering correct protein folds could take researchers months, but AI can replicate similar results in just hours, opening up new possibilities in the study of diseases or the production of new treatments.
“We went from the ability to solve a very few number of protein shapes per year — maybe in the hundreds — to hundreds of millions,” Mullin said. “AI is unlocking some superhuman abilities.”
That, Mullin said, is the most exciting thing about AI, in his view: Not what AI can do instead of us, but what it can help us to do better. To borrow from Robert Browning, how might AI be used as a tool to help our grasp catch up to our reach?
“I think AI has the potential to be an incredible leap forward in terms of our abilities,” Mullin said. “We don’t know for sure what the long-term impacts of AI will be, but it’s a technology that can decouple our abilities from our physical limitations.”
Mullin will present “Demystifying AI” as part of the monthly “Village Voices” series Thursday, Feb 20, beginning at 7 p.m. at the Senior Center. All are welcome and encouraged to attend. The event, as always, will also be streamed on Zoom and recorded; to get the Zoom link, register at MyActiveCenter.com, call 937-767-5751 or email info@ysseniors.org.
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