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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 friend in the passenger seat advised a right turn toward a famous spot for bouillabaisse. However, the navigation app on my phone commanded us to continue straight. Fatigued and in a stifling car, I heeded the algorithm's advice. Moments later, we were stuck at a roadwork site.

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

The Enlightenment's Promise 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, "represents the incapacity to use one's personal reason without direction from another." For ages, that guiding "other" for human thought was often the priest, the king, or the landowner – entities purporting to speak for divine will. To comprehend phenomena like changing seasons, people sought answers in religion. In organizing the fabric of society, from commerce to love, faith acted as the main compass.

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

Kant maintained that humans had the capacity for reason. They simply lacked the confidence to employ it. With revolutions in America and France, a fresh era arrived: reason would replace blind faith, and the human mind, freed from dogma, would become the driver of progress and a better world.

Today, two and a half centuries later, one might question if we are slipping back into a state of intellectual immaturity. An app dictating a direction is merely the start. AI risks becoming our new "other" – a silent guide that influences our choices and behaviors. We are in danger of ceding the historically earned autonomy to think independently – and now, not to deities or rulers, but to lines of code.

The Swift Adoption 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 contemplating a breakup or choosing a candidate, individuals are looking to machines for guidance. Data suggests a significant portion of user prompts concern personal life matters. Even more intriguing than our use of AI for judgment is what happens when we allow it express for us. Composition is now one of the top uses for generative AI, just behind practical requests. The late American author Joan Didion once remarked, “I write purely to discover what I am thinking.” What transpires when we cease writing? Do we lose that path?

Alarmingly, some evidence suggests the answer may be yes. A study conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used brain monitoring to track the cognitive activity of essay writers who had access to AI, traditional search engines, or no aids. Those who could rely on AI showed the least cognitive engagement and had difficulty quoting their own work. Maybe most concerning was that after a few months, individuals in the AI group grew increasingly reliant, pasting large sections of text.

“Laziness and cowardice,” Kant wrote, “are the reasons why so great a proportion of men … stay in perpetual nonage.”

Certainly, AI's appeal lies in its convenience. It saves time, minimizes work and – importantly – offers a new method to offload accountability. In his 1941 book, Escape from Freedom, the German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm argued that the rise of fascism could be understood by a preference to surrender personal freedom in for the sake of the reassuring certainty of subordination. AI offers a digital avenue for surrendering the weight of having to decide for oneself.

The Black Box Problem: Faith Over Reason

AI's primary draw is its capacity to perform tasks beyond our minds – sifting through oceans of data at lightning pace. Stuck in the car in Marseille, this was, ultimately, why I chose to trust the machine over my companion (a decision she interpreted as an affront). With knowledge of real-time information, certainly the app had superior insight – or so I thought.

The core issue is that AI is a opaque system. It produces answers, but without necessarily deepening human understanding. We cannot fully grasp how AI reaches its decisions – even its programmers acknowledge the opacity. Nor can we check its logic against clear, objective criteria. So when we follow AI's recommendation, we are not being led by logic. We are returning to the realm of belief. In dubio pro machina: when in doubt, side with the machine – that may become our 21st-century guiding principle.

Harnessing Without Eroding: The Critical Balance

AI can be a formidable ally for humanity in scientific pursuit. It can help medical research, free us from "bullshit jobs", or handle administrative chores – work that demand little thought and offer little satisfaction. This is beneficial. But Kant and his contemporaries did not champion reason over faith just so humans could assemble better furniture or have extra free time. Independent thought was not merely about efficiency – it was a discipline of freedom and human emancipation.

Human thought is often chaotic and error-prone, but it compels us to debate, to doubt, to challenge concepts – and to recognize the boundaries of our own knowledge. It fosters self-reliance, both personally and as a society. For Kant, the use of reason was never solely about acquiring knowledge; it was about enabling people to become authors of their own destinies, and to oppose control. It was about creating a ethical society grounded in the shared principle of rational discourse, rather than unquestioning acceptance.

With all the undeniable benefits AI offers, the key question remains: how can we leverage its potential of superhuman intelligence without undermining human reasoning, the cornerstone of the Enlightenment and of free societies itself? That may be one of the defining questions of our century. It is a question we must strive not to delegate to the machine.