🔗 Share this article

This recent season, I was caught in congested traffic on the sweltering streets of a southern French city. At an intersection, my friend in the passenger seat advised a right turn toward a famous spot for fish soup. However, the digital guide on my phone commanded us to go forward. Weary and overheated, I heeded the app's directive. Moments later, we were stranded at a roadwork site.

A seemingly trivial incident, maybe. But one that encapsulates a defining dilemma of our time, where technology touches nearly every facet of existence: who gets our trust more – other people and our personal instincts, or the machine?

A Call for Intellectual Maturity and Our Modern Relapse

The influential German philosopher Immanuel Kant famously described the Enlightenment as "man's release from its self-imposed nonage." This immaturity, he wrote, "is the inability to use one's personal reason without guidance from an external source." For centuries, that guiding "other" for society was often the clergyman, the king, or the feudal lord – figures claiming to channel God's voice. To comprehend natural events like volcanic eruptions, people looked for explanations in religion. In shaping the fabric of society, from commerce 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 always possessed the capacity for reason. They just didn't have the boldness to employ it. With upheavals in the 18th century, a new dawn emerged: reason would supplant superstition, and the human mind, freed from authority, would become the engine of advancement and a better world.

Now, two and a half centuries later, one might question if we are quietly regressing into a state of intellectual immaturity. An app suggesting a driving route is merely the start. AI threatens to become our contemporary authority – a silent overseer that influences our decisions and behaviors. We risk ceding the hard-won autonomy to reason for ourselves – and this time, not to deities or rulers, but to computer programs.

The Swift Adoption and Subtle Dangers of AI Dependence

ChatGPT debuted only in 2022, and already a global survey found that an vast number of respondents had engaged with artificial intelligence in the previous six months. Whether contemplating a breakup or selecting a vote, individuals are looking to algorithms for counsel. Data suggests a large majority of user prompts concern non-work topics. Even more intriguing than our use of AI for judgment is what happens when we allow it speak for us. Writing is now one of the most common uses for tools like ChatGPT, second only to practical requests. The late American author Joan Didion once remarked, “I write entirely to discover what I am thinking.” What occurs when we stop composing? Do we lose that path?

Worryingly, emerging research hints the answer may be yes. A study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used electroencephalography to track the mental engagement of participants who had access to AI, Google, or nothing. Those who could rely on AI displayed the least brain activity and had trouble quoting their own work. Perhaps most concerning was that after a few months, participants in the AI group became increasingly reliant, copying large sections of text.

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

Of course, AI's attraction stems from its convenience. It saves time, minimizes work and – importantly – offers a new method to abdicate accountability. In his 1941 book, Escape from Freedom, the German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm proposed that the rise of fascism could be partly explained by a human tendency to give up personal freedom in exchange for the reassuring certainty of obedience. AI offers a modern method of surrendering the burden of having to decide for oneself.

The Opacity Dilemma: Faith Over Reason

AI's primary draw is its ability to perform tasks beyond our minds – analyzing oceans of data at lightning pace. Sitting in the car in Marseille, this was, ultimately, why I chose to trust the machine over my friend (a decision she interpreted as an insult). With knowledge of real-time information, certainly the app must know best – or so I believed.

The core issue is that AI operates as a black box. It produces answers, but not always deepening human understanding. We do not truly know how AI reaches its decisions – including its programmers acknowledge the opacity. Nor can we check its reasoning against transparent standards. So when we follow AI's recommendation, we are not being led by logic. We are returning to the domain of faith. In dubio pro machina: when in doubt, side with the machine – that could be our 21st-century credo.

Harnessing Without Eroding: The Essential Challenge

AI can be a powerful tool for humanity in scientific pursuit. It can aid in medical research, free us from "bullshit jobs", or handle administrative chores – work that demand little thought and offer little satisfaction. All to the good. But Kant and his contemporaries did not advocate for enlightenment just so humans could assemble better furniture or have extra free time. Critical thinking was not merely about productivity – it was a practice of freedom and human emancipation.

Human thought is inherently messy and error-prone, but it compels us to debate, to question, to challenge concepts – and to recognize the limits of our own understanding. It fosters self-reliance, both personally and as a society. For Kant, the use of reason was never only about acquiring knowledge; it was about enabling people to become authors of their own destinies, and to resist control. It was about creating a ethical society grounded in the common foundation of reason and debate, rather than blind belief.

With all the undeniable benefits AI offers, the key question remains: how can we leverage its promise of superhuman intelligence without eroding human reasoning, the bedrock of the Enlightenment and of liberal democracy themselves? That may be one of the defining questions of our time. It is a question we must strive not to outsource to the algorithm.