🔗 Share this article

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 front seat suggested a right turn toward a famous spot for fish soup. Yet, the digital guide on my phone commanded us to continue straight. Fatigued and in a stifling car, I heeded the algorithm's directive. Moments later, we were stranded at a roadwork site.

A minor incident, perhaps. But one that encapsulates a defining dilemma of our era, where digital tools touches almost every aspect of our lives: whom do we trust more – other people and our personal instincts, or the machine?

The Enlightenment's Promise and Our Modern Relapse

The renowned German philosopher Immanuel Kant famously described the Enlightenment as "man's release from its self-inflicted nonage." This immaturity, he argued, "is the inability to use one's own understanding without guidance from an external source." For centuries, that directing force for human thought was often the priest, the king, or the landowner – entities purporting to channel divine will. To explain phenomena like volcanic eruptions, people looked for explanations in religion. In organizing the fabric of society, from economics to matters of the heart, faith served as the primary guide.

“Sapere aude!” or “Have courage to use your reason!”

Kant argued that humans had the ability to think rationally. They just didn't have the boldness to use it. With revolutions in the 18th century, a new dawn arrived: reason would supplant blind faith, and the human mind, freed from authority, would become the engine of progress and a better world.

Today, two and a half centuries later, one might wonder if we are slipping back into a state of intellectual immaturity. An app suggesting a direction is just one example. Artificial intelligence threatens to become our contemporary authority – a unseen overseer that steers our choices and actions. We are in danger of ceding the hard-won autonomy to think independently – and now, 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 recent study found that an vast number of respondents had used AI in the preceding half-year. Whether deciding on ending a relationship or selecting a vote, individuals are looking to machines for guidance. Research suggests a large majority of user prompts concern non-work topics. Even more striking than our use of AI for advice is what occurs when we let it express for us. Composition is now one of the most common uses for tools like ChatGPT, just behind practical requests. 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?

Alarmingly, emerging research suggests the answer may be affirmative. A study conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used electroencephalography to observe the mental engagement of participants who had access to AI, Google, or nothing. Those who could use AI displayed the lowest cognitive engagement and had trouble accurately recalling their own work. Perhaps most concerning was that over time, individuals in the AI group became increasingly reliant, copying entire blocks of text.

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

Certainly, AI's appeal lies in its convenience. It saves time, minimizes work and – critically – offers a new method to offload responsibility. In his 1941 book, Escape from Freedom, the German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm proposed that the appeal of authoritarianism could be understood by a human tendency to give up autonomy in for the sake of the comforting security of subordination. AI presents a modern avenue for surrendering the weight of having to think and choose.

The Black Box Problem: Faith Over Reason

AI's greatest allure is its ability to perform tasks outside our minds – sifting through vast datasets at lightning pace. Stuck in the car in Marseille, this was, after all, why I opted to believe the app over my companion (a choice she took as an insult). With knowledge of real-time information, surely the app must know best – or so I thought.

The core issue is that AI is a opaque system. It produces answers, but without necessarily deepening human comprehension. We cannot fully grasp how AI reaches its decisions – even its creators acknowledge the opacity. Nor can we check its reasoning against transparent standards. So when we heed AI's recommendation, we are not being guided by reason. We are returning to the realm of belief. In dubio pro machina: when in doubt, side with the machine – that could be our future credo.

Harnessing Without Eroding: The Critical Balance

AI can be a powerful tool for mankind in rational inquiry. It can help medical research, 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 peers did not advocate for reason over faith just so humans could optimize chores or have more leisure. Independent thought was not just about productivity – it was a discipline of liberty and human self-determination.

Human thought is often chaotic and fallible, but it forces us to argue, 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 only about information; it was about empowering people to become authors of their own destinies, and to oppose domination. It was about building a moral community based on the common foundation of rational discourse, rather than unquestioning acceptance.

With all the undeniable benefits AI brings, the key question is this: how can we harness its promise of advanced capability without eroding human rationality, the cornerstone of the Enlightenment and of free societies themselves? That is likely one of the defining questions of our century. It is a question we would do well not to delegate to the machine.