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This recent season, I found myself navigating 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 bouillabaisse. Yet, the digital guide on my phone instructed us to go forward. Fatigued and overheated, I followed the app's directive. Minutes later, we were stuck at a construction site.

A seemingly trivial event, perhaps. But one that captures a central dilemma of our era, where technology touches almost every aspect of existence: who gets our trust to a greater degree – 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 "humanity's emergence from its self-imposed nonage." This immaturity, he wrote, "is the inability to use one's own understanding without direction from another." For centuries, that guiding "other" for society was often the clergyman, the king, or the feudal lord – entities claiming to speak for God's voice. To comprehend phenomena like changing seasons, people looked for explanations in theology. In organizing the social world, from economics to love, faith acted as the primary guide.

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

Kant maintained 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 new dawn emerged: reason would replace superstition, and the intellect, liberated from dogma, would become the driver of advancement and a more ethical world.

Today, two and a half centuries later, one might wonder if we are quietly regressing into a state of intellectual immaturity. An app dictating a driving route is merely the start. Artificial intelligence threatens to become our contemporary authority – a unseen overseer that steers our choices and actions. We are in danger of relinquishing 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 AI Dependence

ChatGPT debuted a mere three years ago, and yet a recent study indicated that an overwhelming majority of people had engaged with artificial intelligence in the previous six months. Whether deciding on a breakup or selecting a vote, individuals are looking to algorithms for guidance. Research suggests a significant portion of user prompts concern personal life matters. Even more intriguing than our use of AI for judgment is what happens when we allow it speak for us. Writing is now one of the most common uses for tools like ChatGPT, second only to 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, some evidence suggests the answer may be affirmative. A study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used brain monitoring to track the cognitive activity of participants who had access to AI, traditional search engines, or no aids. Those who could rely on AI displayed the least cognitive engagement and had trouble quoting their own work. Perhaps most troubling was that over time, participants in the AI group grew increasingly reliant, copying large sections of text.

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

Certainly, AI's attraction lies in its convenience. It saves time, minimizes work and – critically – offers a novel way to offload accountability. 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 reassuring certainty of obedience. AI offers a modern method of surrendering the weight of having to decide for oneself.

The Opacity Dilemma: Trust Without Understanding

AI's primary draw is its ability to accomplish things beyond human capability – sifting through oceans of data at lightning pace. Stuck in the car in Marseille, this was, ultimately, why I chose to trust the app over my companion (a choice she took as an affront). With access to real-time information, certainly the algorithm had superior insight – or so I believed.

The core issue is that AI is a black box. It produces answers, but without necessarily fostering human understanding. We cannot fully grasp how AI reaches its decisions – including its creators acknowledge the opacity. Nor can we check its reasoning against clear, objective criteria. So when we heed AI's advice, we are not being guided by reason. We are back in the realm of faith. In dubio pro machina: when in doubt, side with the machine – that may become our future guiding principle.

Using Without Losing: The Critical Balance

AI can be a formidable ally for mankind in rational inquiry. It can aid in medical research, liberate us from "bullshit jobs", or handle taxes – work that are repetitive and are unfulfilling. 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 merely about efficiency – it was a practice of liberty and human emancipation.

Human thought is inherently messy and fallible, but it compels us to debate, to doubt, to challenge concepts – and to acknowledge the boundaries of our own knowledge. It fosters confidence, both personally and as a society. For Kant, the use of reason was never only about information; it was about enabling people to become authors of their own lives, and to resist domination. It was about building a ethical society grounded in the common foundation of rational discourse, rather than unquestioning acceptance.

With all the advantages AI offers, 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 liberal democracy themselves? That is likely one of the central dilemmas of our century. It is a question we must strive not to outsource to the algorithm.