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This recent season, I found myself navigating in gridlocked traffic on the sweltering streets of a southern French city. At a crossing, my companion in the front seat advised a right turn toward a renowned spot for fish soup. However, the digital guide on my phone instructed us to continue straight. Weary and overheated, I heeded the algorithm's advice. Moments later, we were stranded at a roadwork site.

A minor incident, maybe. But one that captures a central question of our era, where technology touches nearly every facet of existence: whom do we trust more – other people and our own intuition, or the algorithm?

A Call for Intellectual Maturity and Our Modern Relapse

The renowned German philosopher Immanuel Kant once defined the Enlightenment as "man's release from its self-inflicted immaturity." This state, he wrote, "is the incapacity to use one's own understanding without direction from another." For centuries, that directing force for human thought was often the clergyman, the king, or the landowner – entities purporting to channel God's voice. To comprehend phenomena like changing seasons, people sought answers in religion. In shaping the fabric of society, from economics to matters of the heart, religious doctrine acted as the main compass.

“Sapere aude!” or “Have courage to use your own understanding!”

Kant argued that humans had the capacity for reason. They just didn't have the confidence to employ it. With upheavals in America and France, a new dawn arrived: reason would replace superstition, and the human mind, liberated from authority, would become the driver of progress and a better world.

Today, two and a half centuries later, one might question if we are quietly regressing into a form of intellectual immaturity. An app dictating a direction is merely the start. AI threatens to become our new "other" – a silent overseer that influences our decisions and actions. We are in danger of ceding the historically earned autonomy to reason for ourselves – and now, not to deities or rulers, but to lines of code.

The Rapid Rise and Subtle Dangers of AI Dependence

ChatGPT was launched only in 2022, and yet a global survey found that an overwhelming majority of respondents had used AI in the preceding half-year. Whether deciding on a breakup or selecting a vote, individuals are looking to machines for counsel. Data suggests a significant portion of user queries relate to personal life matters. Even more intriguing than our use of AI for judgment is what happens when we let it express for us. Writing is now among the top uses for tools like ChatGPT, just behind practical requests. The celebrated American author Joan Didion once remarked, “I write entirely to discover what I am thinking.” What occurs when we cease writing? Do we cease discovering?

Alarmingly, some evidence hints the answer may be affirmative. A study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used brain monitoring to track the cognitive activity of essay writers who had could use AI, traditional search engines, or nothing. Those who could use AI displayed the least cognitive engagement and had difficulty accurately recalling their own work. Maybe most concerning was that after a few months, participants in the AI group grew increasingly reliant, copying large sections of text.

“Inertia and fear,” Kant wrote, “are the reasons why so many of men … remain in perpetual nonage.”

Of course, AI's appeal lies in its convenience. It is fast, minimizes work and – critically – offers a novel way to offload accountability. In his 1941 book, Escape from Freedom, the German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm proposed that the appeal of authoritarianism could be partly explained by a preference to give up autonomy in exchange for the reassuring certainty of subordination. AI presents a digital method of relinquishing the burden of having to think and choose.

The Black Box Problem: Faith Over Reason

AI's primary draw is its capacity to accomplish things beyond human capability – analyzing oceans of data at lightning pace. Sitting in the car in Marseille, this was, ultimately, why I opted to trust the machine over my companion (a choice she took as an affront). With knowledge of real-time information, surely the algorithm must know best – or so I believed.

The fundamental problem is that AI operates as a opaque system. It generates knowledge, but not always fostering human understanding. We cannot fully grasp how AI reaches its decisions – even its programmers acknowledge the opacity. Nor can we check its reasoning against clear, objective criteria. So when we heed AI's advice, we are not being led by logic. We are returning to the domain of faith. In dubio pro machina: when in doubt, trust the machine – that could be our 21st-century guiding principle.

Using Without Losing: The Essential Challenge

AI can be a formidable ally for humanity in scientific pursuit. It can help medical research, liberate us from tedious tasks, or handle taxes – duties that demand little thought and are unfulfilling. This is beneficial. But Kant and his contemporaries did not champion reason over faith just so humans could assemble better furniture or have more leisure. Independent thought was not just about productivity – it was a discipline of freedom and human self-determination.

Human thought is inherently messy and error-prone, but it forces us to debate, to question, to challenge concepts – and to recognize the boundaries of our own understanding. It builds confidence, both personally and collectively. For Kant, the exercise of reason was never only about acquiring knowledge; it was about empowering people to become authors of their own lives, and to oppose domination. It was about building a ethical society grounded in the common foundation of reason and debate, rather than unquestioning acceptance.

With all the undeniable benefits AI brings, the paramount challenge remains: how can we leverage its promise of superhuman intelligence without eroding human rationality, the bedrock of the Enlightenment and of liberal democracy themselves? That is likely one of the central dilemmas of our century. It is a question we must strive not to delegate to the algorithm.