🔗 Share this article

This recent season, I was caught in gridlocked traffic on the sweltering streets of a southern French city. At an intersection, my friend in the front seat suggested a right turn toward a renowned spot for fish soup. Yet, the digital guide on my phone commanded us to go forward. Weary and in a stifling car, I followed the app's directive. Minutes later, we were stranded at a construction site.

A seemingly trivial incident, perhaps. But one that encapsulates a defining question of our era, where technology permeates almost every aspect of existence: who gets our trust to a greater degree – other people and our personal instincts, or the machine?

A Call for Intellectual Maturity and A Contemporary Backslide

The influential German philosopher Immanuel Kant once defined the Enlightenment as "man's release from its self-inflicted immaturity." This immaturity, he wrote, "is the incapacity to use one's personal reason without direction from another." For ages, that directing force for human thought was frequently the priest, the monarch, or the landowner – figures purporting to speak for God's voice. To explain phenomena like changing seasons, people looked for explanations in religion. In shaping the social world, from economics to love, religious doctrine acted as the primary guide.

“Sapere aude!” or “Dare to use your reason!”

Kant maintained that humans always possessed the capacity for reason. They simply lacked the boldness to employ it. With upheavals in America and France, a new dawn arrived: reason would replace blind faith, and the intellect, liberated from authority, 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 form of dependency. An app suggesting a direction is merely the start. AI risks becoming our new "other" – a unseen guide that steers our choices and behaviors. We risk relinquishing the historically earned autonomy to think independently – and this time, not to deities or rulers, but to lines of code.

The Swift Adoption and Hidden Risks of Algorithmic Reliance

ChatGPT was launched a mere three years ago, and yet a recent study found that an vast number of people had engaged with artificial intelligence in the preceding half-year. Whether contemplating a breakup or choosing a candidate, individuals are increasingly turning to algorithms for counsel. Data suggests a large majority of user queries relate to non-work topics. 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 most common uses for generative AI, second only to everyday tasks. The late American author Joan Didion famously said, “I write purely to discover what I am thinking.” What occurs when we stop composing? Do we cease discovering?

Worryingly, emerging research hints the answer may be affirmative. A study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used electroencephalography to observe the cognitive activity of participants who had could use AI, traditional search engines, or nothing. Those who could rely on AI displayed the lowest cognitive engagement and had difficulty accurately recalling their own work. Maybe most troubling was that over time, individuals in the AI group grew progressively lazier, copying entire blocks of text.

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

Certainly, AI's attraction stems from its convenience. It is fast, reduces effort and – critically – offers a novel way to offload responsibility. In his 1941 book, Escape from Freedom, the German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm proposed 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 offers a digital method of relinquishing the burden of having to decide for oneself.

The Opacity Dilemma: Trust Without Understanding

AI's greatest allure is its ability to perform tasks beyond our minds – sifting through oceans of data at unprecedented speed. Sitting in the car in Marseille, this was, ultimately, why I chose to believe the app over my companion (a choice she took as an insult). With access to real-time information, surely the app had superior insight – or so I believed.

The fundamental problem is that AI operates as a black box. It produces knowledge, but without necessarily fostering human understanding. We do not truly know the process behind its conclusions – including its programmers admit this. Nor can we check 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, side with the machine – that may become our future credo.

Using Without Losing: The Essential Challenge

AI can be a powerful tool for humanity in scientific pursuit. It can help inventing drugs, free us from "bullshit jobs", or manage taxes – work that are repetitive and offer little satisfaction. All to the good. 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 efficiency – it was a practice of freedom and human self-determination.

Human thought is often chaotic and fallible, but it forces us to argue, to question, to test ideas – and to acknowledge the boundaries of our own knowledge. It builds self-reliance, both personally and collectively. For Kant, the use of reason was never only about information; it was about empowering people to become authors of their own lives, and to resist control. It was about creating a moral community based on the common foundation of rational discourse, rather than blind belief.

With all the advantages AI brings, the key question is this: how can we harness its potential of advanced capability without undermining human reasoning, the cornerstone of the Enlightenment and of liberal democracy themselves? That is likely one of the defining questions of our time. It is a question we must strive not to delegate to the algorithm.