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This past summer, I was caught in congested traffic on the sweltering streets of a southern French city. At a crossing, my companion in the passenger seat suggested a right turn toward a famous spot for fish soup. Yet, the navigation app on my phone commanded us to continue straight. Weary and in a stifling car, I heeded the app's advice. Minutes later, we were stranded at a construction site.

A minor incident, maybe. But one that encapsulates a defining dilemma of our era, where technology touches almost every aspect of existence: who gets our trust to a greater degree – fellow humans and our own intuition, or the machine?

A Call for Intellectual Maturity and A Contemporary Backslide

The renowned German philosopher Immanuel Kant once defined the Enlightenment as "humanity's emergence from its self-inflicted immaturity." This state, he argued, "is the inability to use one's own understanding without guidance from an external source." For centuries, that guiding "other" for human thought was frequently the clergyman, the king, or the landowner – figures claiming to channel divine will. To comprehend phenomena like volcanic eruptions, people looked for explanations in theology. In organizing the fabric of society, from commerce to matters of the heart, faith served as the main compass.

“Sapere aude!” or “Dare to use your own understanding!”

Kant maintained that humans had the capacity for reason. They just didn't have the confidence to use it. With revolutions in the 18th century, a fresh era emerged: logic would supplant blind faith, and the intellect, freed from authority, would become the engine of progress and a more ethical world.

Today, 250 years later, one might wonder if we are quietly regressing into a state of dependency. An app dictating a driving route is merely the start. Artificial intelligence threatens to become our new "other" – a silent overseer that influences our choices and behaviors. We risk ceding the hard-won courage to reason for ourselves – and now, not to gods or kings, but to lines of code.

The Swift Adoption and Hidden Risks of Algorithmic Reliance

ChatGPT debuted only in 2022, and already a recent study indicated that an vast number of people had used AI in the previous six months. Whether deciding on a breakup or selecting a vote, individuals are looking to algorithms for guidance. Data suggests a large majority of user prompts relate to personal life matters. Even more intriguing than our reliance on AI for judgment is what occurs when we let it express for us. Composition is now among the top uses for generative AI, just behind everyday tasks. The celebrated American author Joan Didion famously said, “I write purely to discover what I am thinking.” What transpires when we stop composing? Do we cease discovering?

Alarmingly, some evidence suggests the answer may be yes. A study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used electroencephalography to observe the cognitive activity of participants who had could use AI, Google, or nothing. Those who could rely on AI showed the least brain activity and had difficulty accurately recalling their own work. Perhaps most troubling was that after a few months, individuals in the AI group grew increasingly reliant, pasting entire blocks of text.

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

Certainly, AI's appeal lies in its efficiency. It saves time, minimizes work and – critically – offers a novel way to abdicate responsibility. 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 method of surrendering the weight of having to decide for oneself.

The Black Box Problem: Trust Without Understanding

AI's greatest allure is its ability to perform tasks beyond our minds – sifting through oceans of data at lightning pace. Stuck in the car in Marseille, this was, after all, why I opted to trust the app over my friend (a decision she took as an affront). 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 generates answers, but not always deepening human understanding. We do not truly know how AI reaches its conclusions – including 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 led by logic. We are back in the realm of faith. In dubio pro machina: when in doubt, side with the machine – that may become our 21st-century credo.

Using Without Losing: The Essential Challenge

AI can be a powerful tool for humanity in scientific pursuit. It can help medical research, liberate us from tedious tasks, or handle administrative chores – work that demand little thought and offer little satisfaction. This is beneficial. But Kant and his peers did not champion enlightenment just so humans could assemble better furniture or have extra free time. Independent thought was not just about efficiency – it was a practice of liberty and human self-determination.

Human thought is often chaotic and error-prone, but it compels us to debate, to doubt, to challenge concepts – and to acknowledge the limits of our own understanding. It builds self-reliance, both individually and collectively. 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 oppose control. It was about creating a ethical society grounded in the common foundation of reason and debate, rather than unquestioning acceptance.

With all the undeniable benefits AI offers, the key question is this: how can we harness its promise of superhuman intelligence without eroding human rationality, the cornerstone of the Enlightenment and of liberal democracy themselves? That may be one of the central dilemmas of our century. It is a question we must strive not to outsource to the machine.