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This recent season, I was caught in congested traffic on the scorching streets of a southern French city. At a crossing, my friend in the front seat suggested a right turn toward a famous spot for fish soup. However, the navigation app on my phone instructed us to continue straight. Weary and overheated, I followed the app's directive. Moments later, we were stuck at a roadwork site.

A minor event, maybe. But one that captures a defining dilemma of our time, where technology permeates almost every aspect of our lives: who gets our trust more – other people and our personal instincts, or the machine?

A Call for Intellectual Maturity and A Contemporary Backslide

The influential German philosopher Immanuel Kant famously described the Enlightenment as "humanity's emergence from its self-inflicted immaturity." This state, he wrote, "is the inability to use one's own understanding without direction from an external source." For ages, that directing force for society was often the clergyman, the monarch, or the landowner – figures purporting to channel divine will. To explain natural events like volcanic eruptions, people looked for explanations in theology. In shaping the fabric of society, from economics to matters of the heart, faith acted as the main compass.

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

Kant maintained that humans had the ability to think rationally. They just didn't have the confidence to employ it. With upheavals in America and France, a fresh era arrived: reason would supplant superstition, and the human mind, liberated from dogma, would become the driver of advancement and a better world.

Now, 250 years later, one might question if we are quietly regressing into a form of intellectual immaturity. An app dictating a direction is merely the start. Artificial intelligence risks becoming our new "other" – a unseen guide that influences our decisions and behaviors. We are in danger of ceding the hard-won courage to reason for ourselves – and this time, not to gods or kings, but to lines of code.

The Swift Adoption and Hidden Risks 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 increasingly turning to machines for guidance. Data suggests a large majority of user prompts relate to personal life matters. Even more striking than our reliance on AI for advice is what occurs when we let it express for us. Composition is now among the most common uses for tools like ChatGPT, second only to everyday tasks. The celebrated American author Joan Didion famously said, “I write entirely to find out what I am thinking.” What transpires when we cease writing? Do we cease discovering?

Alarmingly, some evidence hints the answer may be yes. A study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used brain monitoring to observe the mental engagement of participants who had could use AI, Google, or nothing. Those who could use AI displayed the lowest brain activity and had difficulty quoting their own work. Maybe most troubling was that after a few months, participants in the AI group grew progressively lazier, copying large sections of text.

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

Certainly, AI's attraction lies in its convenience. It is fast, reduces effort and – importantly – 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 human tendency to surrender personal freedom in for the sake of the comforting security of obedience. AI offers a digital avenue for surrendering the weight of having to decide for oneself.

The Opacity Dilemma: Trust Without Understanding

AI's greatest allure is its capacity to accomplish things outside our minds – sifting through vast datasets at unprecedented speed. Stuck in the car in Marseille, this was, after all, why I chose to believe the machine over my companion (a choice she took as an insult). With knowledge of all the data, surely 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 do not truly know how AI reaches its conclusions – including its programmers admit this. Nor can we check its reasoning against clear, objective criteria. So when we follow AI's advice, we are not being guided by reason. We are returning to the realm of faith. In dubio pro machina: when in doubt, trust the machine – that could be our 21st-century credo.

Harnessing Without Eroding: The Essential Challenge

AI can be a powerful tool for mankind in scientific pursuit. It can aid in inventing drugs, liberate us from tedious tasks, or handle administrative chores – duties that are repetitive and are unfulfilling. All to the good. 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 merely about productivity – it was a practice of freedom and human emancipation.

Human thought is inherently messy and error-prone, but it forces us to debate, to question, to test ideas – and to acknowledge the limits of our own understanding. It fosters confidence, both individually and collectively. 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 domination. 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 paramount challenge remains: how can we leverage its promise of advanced capability without undermining human rationality, the bedrock of the Enlightenment and of free societies itself? That may be one of the defining questions of our time. It is a question we would do well not to outsource to the algorithm.