🔗 Share this article

This recent season, I found myself navigating in gridlocked traffic on the scorching streets of a southern French city. At an intersection, my friend in the front seat suggested a right turn toward a famous spot for bouillabaisse. However, the digital guide on my phone instructed us to go forward. Fatigued and overheated, I heeded the algorithm's advice. Minutes later, we were stranded at a construction site.

A minor incident, maybe. But one that captures a central question of our time, where technology permeates almost every aspect of existence: whom do we trust more – fellow humans and our own intuition, or the machine?

A Call for Intellectual Maturity and Our Modern Relapse

The influential German philosopher Immanuel Kant once defined the Enlightenment as "humanity's emergence from its self-imposed nonage." This immaturity, he argued, "represents the inability to use one's personal reason without direction from an external source." For ages, that guiding "other" for society was often the clergyman, the king, or the feudal lord – figures claiming to channel divine will. To comprehend phenomena like changing seasons, people looked for explanations in theology. In organizing the fabric of society, from commerce to matters of the heart, faith acted as the main compass.

“Sapere aude!” or “Dare 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: reason would supplant superstition, and the human mind, liberated from dogma, would become the driver of advancement and a more ethical world.

Now, two and a half centuries later, one might question if we are quietly regressing into a form of dependency. An app dictating a driving route is merely the start. AI threatens to become our contemporary authority – a silent overseer that steers our choices and actions. We are in danger of ceding the hard-won autonomy to reason for ourselves – and now, not to deities or rulers, but to computer programs.

The Rapid Rise and Hidden Risks of AI Dependence

ChatGPT was launched a mere three years ago, and yet a recent study found that an vast number of people had used AI in the previous six months. Whether deciding on ending a relationship or selecting a vote, individuals are increasingly turning to algorithms for counsel. Research suggests a significant portion of user prompts concern non-work topics. Even more striking than our use of AI for judgment is what happens when we let it express for us. Composition is now one of the top uses for generative AI, second only to everyday tasks. The celebrated American author Joan Didion once remarked, “I write purely to find out what I am thinking.” What occurs when we cease writing? Do we lose that path?

Worryingly, emerging research hints the answer may be affirmative. A study conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used brain monitoring to track the mental engagement of participants who had access to AI, Google, or no aids. Those who could rely on AI displayed the least brain activity and had trouble quoting their own work. Perhaps most concerning was that after a few months, individuals in the AI group became increasingly reliant, pasting entire blocks of text.

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

Of course, AI's attraction lies in its efficiency. It is fast, minimizes work and – importantly – offers a new method to abdicate responsibility. In his 1941 book, Escape from Freedom, the German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm proposed that the rise of fascism could be partly explained by a preference to surrender autonomy in for the sake of the comforting security of obedience. AI presents a digital method of surrendering the burden of having to think and choose.

The Opacity Dilemma: Faith Over Reason

AI's primary draw is its capacity to accomplish things beyond our minds – analyzing vast datasets at unprecedented speed. Stuck in the car in Marseille, this was, after all, why I chose to trust the machine over my companion (a choice she took as an affront). With access to real-time information, surely the algorithm had superior insight – or so I believed.

The fundamental problem is that AI is a black box. It produces knowledge, but not always fostering human comprehension. We do not truly know the process behind its conclusions – including its programmers acknowledge the opacity. Nor can we check its logic against transparent standards. So when we heed AI's recommendation, 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 21st-century credo.

Using Without Losing: The Critical Balance

AI can be a formidable ally for mankind in scientific pursuit. It can aid in inventing drugs, liberate us from "bullshit jobs", or handle taxes – duties that demand little thought and offer little satisfaction. 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 more leisure. Independent thought was not merely about productivity – it was a discipline of freedom and human emancipation.

Human thought is inherently messy and fallible, but it forces us to debate, to doubt, to test ideas – and to acknowledge the boundaries of our own knowledge. It fosters confidence, both personally and as a society. For Kant, the exercise of reason was never solely about information; 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 reason and debate, rather than blind belief.

With all the advantages AI offers, the key question is this: how can we harness its potential of superhuman intelligence without eroding human rationality, the cornerstone of the Enlightenment and of free societies 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.