🔗 Share this article

This recent season, I was caught in gridlocked traffic on the sweltering streets of a southern French city. At a crossing, my friend in the passenger seat suggested a right turn toward a renowned spot for bouillabaisse. Yet, the navigation app on my phone instructed us to continue straight. Fatigued and in a stifling car, I followed the algorithm's directive. Minutes later, we were stuck at a construction site.

A minor event, perhaps. But one that encapsulates a defining question of our era, where digital tools touches almost every aspect of existence: whom do we trust to a greater degree – other people and our personal instincts, or the algorithm?

The Enlightenment's Promise and A Contemporary Backslide

The influential German philosopher Immanuel Kant once defined the Enlightenment as "humanity's emergence from its self-inflicted immaturity." This state, he argued, "is the inability to use one's personal reason without direction from an external source." For ages, that guiding "other" for human thought was often the clergyman, the king, or the landowner – figures purporting to channel divine will. To explain phenomena like volcanic eruptions, people looked for explanations in religion. In shaping the fabric of society, from economics to matters of the heart, faith served as the main compass.

“Sapere aude!” or “Have courage to use your reason!”

Kant argued that humans always possessed the capacity for reason. They just didn't have the boldness to employ it. With revolutions in the 18th century, a fresh era arrived: reason would supplant blind faith, and the human mind, liberated from dogma, would become the engine of progress and a better world.

Now, 250 years later, one might question if we are quietly regressing into a form of dependency. An app suggesting a driving route is just one example. AI threatens to become our contemporary authority – a unseen overseer that influences our choices and behaviors. We risk ceding the hard-won autonomy to reason for ourselves – and now, not to deities or rulers, but to lines of code.

The Rapid Rise and Hidden Risks of Algorithmic Reliance

ChatGPT was launched only in 2022, and yet a global survey found that an vast number of people had used AI in the previous six months. Whether deciding on ending a relationship or choosing a candidate, individuals are looking to machines for counsel. Data suggests a significant portion of user prompts concern non-work topics. Even more striking than our reliance on AI for advice is what occurs when we let it express for us. Composition is now one of the top uses for generative AI, second only to practical requests. The late American author Joan Didion famously said, “I write entirely to discover what I am thinking.” What occurs when we cease writing? Do we cease discovering?

Alarmingly, emerging research hints the outcome may be affirmative. A study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used brain monitoring to observe the mental engagement of participants who had access to AI, traditional search engines, or no aids. Those who could rely on AI showed the least brain activity and had trouble quoting their own work. Maybe most troubling was that after a few months, participants in the AI group grew increasingly reliant, copying entire blocks of text.

“Laziness and cowardice,” Kant wrote, “are the reasons why so many of men … stay in lifelong immaturity.”

Of course, AI's attraction lies in its convenience. It is fast, reduces effort and – critically – offers a novel way to offload accountability. In his 1941 book, Escape from Freedom, the German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm argued that the rise of fascism could be partly explained by a human tendency to surrender autonomy in exchange for the reassuring certainty of subordination. AI offers a modern method of surrendering the weight of having to think and choose.

The Black Box Problem: Faith Over Reason

AI's primary draw is its ability to accomplish things outside our minds – sifting through vast datasets at unprecedented speed. Sitting in the car in Marseille, this was, after all, why I opted to trust the machine over my companion (a decision she took as an affront). With knowledge of real-time information, certainly the app must know best – or so I thought.

The fundamental problem is that AI is a opaque system. It produces answers, but without necessarily deepening human comprehension. We do not truly know the process behind its decisions – even its programmers admit this. Nor can we verify its reasoning against clear, objective criteria. So when we follow AI's advice, we are not being guided by reason. We are returning to the domain of faith. In dubio pro machina: when in doubt, trust the machine – that may become our 21st-century guiding principle.

Harnessing Without Eroding: The Essential Challenge

AI can be a formidable ally for humanity in rational inquiry. It can help medical research, liberate us from tedious tasks, or handle taxes – duties that are repetitive and offer little satisfaction. This is beneficial. But Kant and his peers did not champion enlightenment just so humans could optimize chores or have more leisure. Critical thinking was not just about productivity – it was a discipline of freedom and human self-determination.

Human thought is often chaotic and fallible, but it forces us to argue, to question, to challenge concepts – and to acknowledge the boundaries of our own understanding. It fosters self-reliance, both individually and as a society. For Kant, the use of reason was never solely about information; it was about enabling people to become authors of their own lives, and to oppose control. It was about creating a ethical society grounded in the common foundation of rational discourse, rather than blind belief.

With all the undeniable benefits AI offers, the paramount challenge is this: how can we leverage its potential of superhuman intelligence without undermining human rationality, the cornerstone of the Enlightenment and of liberal democracy itself? That is likely one of the central dilemmas of our century. It is a question we would do well not to delegate to the machine.