Kerrie Holley returns to RIT for 2026 Fram Signature Lecture on critical thinking and AI
Kerrie Holley, a pioneering technologist and engineer whose career has spanned more than five decades of computing, returns to RIT for the 2026 Eugene H. Fram Signature Lecture in Applied Critical Thinking on November 3, 2026, at 3:30-5 pm in Ingle Auditorium or available to watch virtually. The community is invited, please register here. A reception follows in Fireside Lougue.
Holley’s lecture, “Is AI Just a Stochastic Parrot, Or an Apocalypse Waiting to Happen? A Critical Thinker’s Guide to Cutting Through the Hype and the Fear,” continues a conversation he began at RIT in 2024. Two years later, AI has advanced rapidly, and so have the claims, hopes and fears surrounding it.
Rather than asking audiences to choose between competing narratives about AI, Holley will offer a critical thinker’s approach to evaluating them: Which system? Doing what? With what capabilities? In what context and under what controls?
The lecture is the most visible public expression of the work through RIT’s Applied Critical Thinking Initiative and the Eugene H. Fram Chair in Applied Critical Thinking.
The chair was established in 2011 by RIT alumnus and former trustee Henry Navas to honor Eugene H. “Gene” Fram, Professor Emeritus of Marketing, whose 51 years at RIT and commitment to teaching helped inspire the university’s emphasis on applied critical thinking. Today, Fram’s legacy takes on new relevance as RIT considers what students need to know and be able to do in an AI-enabled world.
Holley brings an exceptional perspective to that conversation. His career has spanned multiple eras of computing and included IBM, Google, Cisco and Optum. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2023 and inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2025.
During the lecture, Holley will take audiences inside how today’s AI works and examine both its breakthroughs in areas such as healthcare, STEM and accessibility and its potential harms, including deepfakes, AI-enabled fraud and the erosion of trust in what we see and hear.
Most importantly, Holley will give audiences a practical way to separate what has been demonstrated, what is plausible, and what remains speculation.
That challenge gets to the heart of the RIT Applied Critical Thinking Initiative. As AI becomes increasingly capable, the human role does not disappear. It changes. AI can give us output. Critical thinking helps us determine what deserves to become an answer.
And critical thinking itself does not happen in a vacuum. It draws on what we know, both broadly and deeply within our disciplines, to question evidence, recognize context, challenge assumptions and consider consequences. That is what allows knowledge to become judgment.
It is a distinctly RIT idea, and one deeply connected to Gene Fram’s legacy: preparing people not simply to know, but to know how to think with what they know.
In the age of AI, that may matter more than ever.