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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 advised a right turn toward a famous spot for fish soup. However, the navigation app on my phone commanded us to continue straight. Weary and in a stifling car, I heeded the app's directive. Moments later, we were stuck at a construction site.

A minor event, perhaps. But one that captures a defining dilemma of our era, where digital tools permeates nearly every facet of our lives: who gets our trust to a greater degree – fellow humans and our own intuition, or the algorithm?

The Enlightenment's Promise and Our Modern Relapse

The renowned German philosopher Immanuel Kant famously described the Enlightenment as "humanity's emergence from its self-inflicted nonage." This state, he wrote, "represents the inability to use one's own understanding without direction from another." For ages, that guiding "other" for human thought was frequently the priest, the king, or the feudal lord – entities purporting to speak for God's voice. To comprehend natural events like changing seasons, people sought answers in religion. In shaping the fabric of society, from economics to matters of the heart, faith acted as the primary guide.

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

Kant argued that humans had the capacity for reason. They simply lacked the confidence to employ it. With revolutions in America and France, a fresh era emerged: reason would replace blind faith, and the intellect, freed from dogma, would become the engine of progress and a better world.

Now, 250 years later, one might wonder if we are slipping back into a state of intellectual immaturity. An app suggesting a driving route is just one example. AI risks becoming our new "other" – a unseen guide that influences our choices and actions. We are in danger of ceding the hard-won courage to think independently – and now, not to deities or rulers, but to computer programs.

The Swift Adoption and Hidden Risks of AI Dependence

ChatGPT was launched only in 2022, and yet a recent study indicated that an overwhelming majority of people had engaged with artificial intelligence in the preceding half-year. Whether deciding on ending a relationship or selecting a vote, individuals are looking to machines for counsel. Data suggests a significant portion of user queries concern personal life matters. Even more intriguing than our reliance on AI for advice is what happens when we allow it express for us. Writing is now one of the top uses for tools like ChatGPT, just behind practical requests. The late American author Joan Didion once remarked, “I write entirely to find out what I am thinking.” What occurs when we cease writing? Do we cease discovering?

Alarmingly, emerging research hints the outcome may be affirmative. A study conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used electroencephalography to observe the cognitive activity of participants who had access to AI, traditional search engines, or no aids. Those who could rely on AI showed the lowest brain activity and had trouble quoting their own work. Perhaps most troubling was that over time, individuals in the AI group grew progressively lazier, pasting entire blocks of text.

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

Certainly, AI's appeal lies in its efficiency. It saves time, reduces effort and – importantly – offers a novel way to offload accountability. 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 exchange for the reassuring certainty of subordination. AI presents a digital avenue for relinquishing 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 oceans of data at unprecedented speed. Stuck in the car in Marseille, this was, ultimately, why I chose to trust the app over my companion (a choice she interpreted as an insult). With access to real-time information, surely the algorithm must know best – or so I believed.

The core issue is that AI operates as a black box. It produces knowledge, but without necessarily deepening human comprehension. We do not truly know the process behind its decisions – including its programmers acknowledge the opacity. Nor can we verify its logic against transparent standards. So when we follow AI's recommendation, we are not being guided by reason. We are back in the realm of belief. In dubio pro machina: when in doubt, trust the machine – that may become our future guiding principle.

Using Without Losing: The Critical Balance

AI can be a powerful tool for mankind in scientific pursuit. It can help inventing drugs, liberate us from "bullshit jobs", or manage administrative chores – duties that are repetitive and offer little satisfaction. All to the good. But Kant and his peers did not advocate for enlightenment just so humans could assemble better furniture or have more leisure. Critical thinking was not just about productivity – it was a practice of liberty and human emancipation.

Human thought is inherently messy and error-prone, but it compels us to argue, to doubt, to challenge concepts – and to recognize the limits of our own understanding. It builds self-reliance, both personally and as a society. For Kant, the use of reason was never solely about information; it was about enabling people to become authors of their own lives, and to oppose domination. It was about building a ethical society grounded in the common foundation of rational discourse, rather than blind belief.

With all the undeniable benefits AI brings, the key question is this: how can we leverage its promise of advanced capability without eroding human reasoning, the bedrock of the Enlightenment and of free societies themselves? That may be one of the defining questions of our century. It is a question we would do well not to outsource to the algorithm.