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This recent season, I was caught in congested traffic on the scorching streets of a southern French city. At a crossing, my friend in the front seat advised a right turn toward a famous spot for bouillabaisse. However, the digital guide on my phone instructed us to continue straight. Weary and in a stifling car, I followed the app's advice. Moments later, we were stuck at a construction site.

A minor incident, maybe. But one that encapsulates a defining question of our era, where digital tools touches nearly every facet of our lives: who gets our trust more – fellow humans and our personal instincts, or the machine?

The Enlightenment's Promise and A Contemporary Backslide

The influential German philosopher Immanuel Kant famously described the Enlightenment as "man's release from its self-imposed immaturity." This state, he argued, "represents the incapacity to use one's personal reason without direction from another." For ages, that directing force for society was often the clergyman, the king, or the landowner – figures purporting to channel God's voice. To explain natural events like changing seasons, people sought answers in theology. In organizing the fabric of society, from economics to love, faith served as the primary guide.

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

Kant argued that humans had the ability to think rationally. They just didn't have the boldness to employ it. With upheavals in America and France, a fresh era emerged: logic would replace blind faith, and the human mind, liberated from dogma, would become the engine of advancement and a more ethical world.

Today, 250 years later, one might wonder if we are quietly regressing into a state of intellectual immaturity. An app dictating a driving route is just one example. Artificial intelligence threatens to become our contemporary authority – a silent guide that influences our choices and actions. We risk ceding the historically earned courage to reason for ourselves – and now, not to deities or rulers, but to lines of code.

The Rapid Rise and Subtle Dangers of Algorithmic Reliance

ChatGPT was launched only in 2022, and already a recent study found that an vast number of respondents had engaged with artificial intelligence in the preceding half-year. Whether contemplating a breakup or selecting a vote, individuals are looking to algorithms for counsel. Research suggests a large majority of user queries concern personal life matters. Even more striking than our use of AI for advice is what happens when we let it speak for us. Writing is now among the most common uses for tools like ChatGPT, just behind practical requests. The celebrated American author Joan Didion once remarked, “I write purely to find out what I am thinking.” What transpires when we cease writing? Do we cease discovering?

Worryingly, some evidence suggests the answer may be yes. A study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used electroencephalography to track the cognitive activity of participants who had access to AI, Google, or nothing. Those who could rely on AI showed the lowest brain activity and had trouble accurately recalling their own work. Perhaps most concerning was that over time, participants in the AI group grew increasingly reliant, pasting entire blocks of text.

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

Certainly, AI's attraction stems from its convenience. It saves time, reduces effort and – critically – offers a new method to offload 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 surrender autonomy in for the sake of the comforting security of obedience. AI offers a digital method of relinquishing the burden of having to think and choose.

The Black Box Problem: Trust Without Understanding

AI's greatest allure is its ability to perform tasks beyond human capability – analyzing vast datasets at unprecedented speed. Stuck in the car in Marseille, this was, ultimately, why I chose to believe the machine over my companion (a decision she interpreted as an insult). With access to real-time information, certainly the app had superior insight – or so I thought.

The core issue is that AI operates as a opaque system. It produces answers, but without necessarily deepening human comprehension. We do not truly know how AI reaches its decisions – even its creators acknowledge the opacity. Nor can we verify its reasoning against transparent standards. So when we follow AI's advice, we are not being guided by reason. We are returning to the realm of faith. In dubio pro machina: when in doubt, trust the machine – that could be our 21st-century guiding principle.

Harnessing Without Eroding: The Essential Challenge

AI can be a powerful tool for mankind in rational inquiry. It can help medical research, liberate us from "bullshit jobs", or handle administrative chores – duties that are repetitive 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 more leisure. Independent thought was not merely about efficiency – it was a practice of liberty and human emancipation.

Human thought is inherently messy and fallible, but it forces us to argue, to question, to challenge concepts – and to recognize the limits of our own knowledge. It builds self-reliance, both individually and collectively. For Kant, the exercise of reason was never only about acquiring knowledge; it was about enabling people to become agents of their own lives, and to oppose control. It was about building a ethical society based on the shared principle of rational discourse, rather than blind belief.

With all the advantages AI brings, the key question is this: how can we leverage its potential of advanced capability without eroding human reasoning, the bedrock of the Enlightenment and of liberal democracy itself? That is likely one of the defining questions of our time. It is a question we must strive not to outsource to the machine.