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This recent season, I found myself navigating in congested traffic on the scorching streets of a southern French city. At an intersection, my companion in the passenger seat advised a right turn toward a renowned spot for fish soup. Yet, the digital guide on my phone commanded us to go forward. Weary and overheated, I heeded the app's advice. Minutes later, we were stranded at a roadwork site.

A seemingly trivial event, maybe. But one that encapsulates a central dilemma of our time, where technology permeates almost every aspect of our lives: who gets our trust to a greater degree – fellow humans and our own intuition, or the machine?

The Enlightenment's Promise and Our Modern Relapse

The influential German philosopher Immanuel Kant once defined the Enlightenment as "humanity's emergence from its self-inflicted nonage." This immaturity, he wrote, "represents the incapacity to use one's own understanding without guidance from an external source." For ages, that directing force for society was frequently the clergyman, the king, or the landowner – figures claiming to speak for God's voice. To comprehend natural events like volcanic eruptions, people sought answers in religion. In organizing the social world, from commerce to matters of the heart, religious doctrine served as the primary guide.

“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 confidence to employ it. With upheavals in America and France, a fresh era arrived: reason would replace superstition, and the human mind, freed from authority, would become the driver of advancement and a more ethical world.

Today, two and a half centuries later, one might question if we are quietly regressing into a form of intellectual immaturity. An app suggesting a driving route is merely the start. AI threatens to become our contemporary authority – a unseen guide that influences our decisions and actions. We are in danger of ceding the historically earned autonomy to reason for ourselves – and this time, not to deities or rulers, but to computer programs.

The Swift Adoption and Subtle Dangers of Algorithmic Reliance

ChatGPT was launched only in 2022, and already a global survey found that an vast number of respondents had used AI in the previous six months. Whether contemplating ending a relationship or choosing a candidate, individuals are increasingly turning to algorithms for guidance. Research suggests a significant portion of user prompts relate to non-work topics. Even more intriguing than our use of AI for advice is what happens when we let it speak for us. Writing is now one of the top uses for tools like ChatGPT, second only to everyday tasks. The celebrated American author Joan Didion once remarked, “I write purely to discover what I am thinking.” What occurs when we stop composing? Do we cease discovering?

Alarmingly, emerging research suggests the outcome may be affirmative. A study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used brain monitoring to observe the cognitive activity of essay writers who had could use AI, Google, or nothing. Those who could rely on AI showed the least brain activity and had trouble quoting their own work. Perhaps most troubling was that over time, individuals in the AI group grew progressively lazier, pasting entire blocks of text.

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

Of course, AI's attraction lies in its convenience. It is fast, minimizes work and – importantly – offers a novel way to abdicate accountability. In his 1941 book, Escape from Freedom, the German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm argued that the rise of fascism could be understood by a human tendency to surrender personal freedom in for the sake of the comforting security of obedience. AI presents a modern method of surrendering the weight of having to decide for oneself.

The Black Box Problem: Faith Over Reason

AI's primary draw is its ability to accomplish things outside our minds – sifting through oceans of data at unprecedented speed. Stuck in the car in Marseille, this was, after all, why I opted to trust the machine over my friend (a decision she took as an insult). With access to all the data, surely the app must know best – or so I believed.

The core issue is that AI operates as a black box. It produces answers, but without necessarily deepening human understanding. We do not truly know the process behind its decisions – even its creators acknowledge the opacity. Nor can we verify its logic against clear, objective criteria. So when we follow AI's advice, we are not being led by logic. We are back in the domain of belief. In dubio pro machina: when in doubt, trust the machine – that could be our future guiding principle.

Using Without Losing: The Critical Balance

AI can be a formidable ally for mankind in rational inquiry. It can help inventing drugs, liberate us from "bullshit jobs", or manage administrative chores – work that demand little thought and are unfulfilling. All to the good. But Kant and his contemporaries did not advocate for reason over faith just so humans could assemble better furniture or have extra free time. Independent thought was not just about efficiency – it was a discipline of freedom and human self-determination.

Human thought is often chaotic and fallible, but it forces us to debate, to doubt, to test ideas – and to acknowledge the limits of our own knowledge. It fosters self-reliance, both personally and collectively. For Kant, the exercise of reason was never solely about information; it was about enabling people to become agents of their own destinies, and to resist domination. It was about building a moral community based on the shared principle of reason and debate, rather than blind belief.

With all the undeniable benefits AI brings, the paramount challenge is this: how can we harness its potential of advanced capability without eroding human rationality, the bedrock of the Enlightenment and of free societies itself? That is likely one of the central dilemmas of our time. It is a question we would do well not to outsource to the machine.