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This past summer, I was caught in congested 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 bouillabaisse. However, the navigation app on my phone instructed us to continue straight. Weary and overheated, I heeded the app's directive. Moments later, we were stuck at a roadwork site.

A seemingly trivial event, perhaps. But one that encapsulates a defining dilemma of our era, where technology touches almost every aspect of existence: who gets our trust to a greater degree – other people and our own intuition, or the machine?

The Enlightenment's Promise and A Contemporary Backslide

The renowned German philosopher Immanuel Kant once defined the Enlightenment as "humanity's emergence from its self-inflicted immaturity." This immaturity, he argued, "represents the inability to use one's own understanding without direction from another." For centuries, that directing force for human thought was often the priest, the king, or the landowner – entities claiming to channel God's voice. To comprehend phenomena like volcanic eruptions, people looked for explanations in theology. In shaping the fabric of society, from economics to matters of the heart, religious doctrine acted as the primary guide.

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

Kant argued that humans had the ability to think rationally. They simply lacked the boldness to use it. With revolutions in America and France, a new dawn emerged: logic would replace blind faith, and the human mind, liberated from dogma, would become the engine of progress and a more ethical world.

Now, two and a half centuries later, one might wonder if we are slipping back into a form of intellectual immaturity. An app dictating a driving route is just one example. AI risks becoming our contemporary authority – a unseen overseer that steers our choices and actions. We are in danger of ceding the historically earned courage to reason for ourselves – and now, not to gods or kings, but to computer programs.

The Swift Adoption and Hidden Risks of AI Dependence

ChatGPT was launched only in 2022, and already a global survey indicated that an overwhelming majority of respondents had engaged with artificial intelligence in the preceding half-year. Whether contemplating ending a relationship or selecting a vote, individuals are looking to algorithms for counsel. Research suggests a significant portion of user queries relate to personal life matters. Even more intriguing than our reliance on AI for judgment is what happens when we let it speak for us. Composition is now one of the top uses for tools like ChatGPT, second only to practical requests. The celebrated American author Joan Didion famously said, “I write entirely to find out what I am thinking.” What transpires when we stop composing? Do we lose that path?

Worryingly, some evidence suggests the outcome may be affirmative. A study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used electroencephalography to track the cognitive activity of participants who had could use AI, Google, or nothing. Those who could rely on AI displayed the least brain activity and had difficulty accurately recalling their own work. Perhaps most troubling was that over time, participants in the AI group became progressively lazier, pasting large sections of text.

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

Of course, AI's attraction lies in its efficiency. It saves time, reduces effort and – critically – offers a novel way to abdicate responsibility. In his 1941 book, Escape from Freedom, the German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm argued that the rise of fascism could be understood by a human tendency to surrender personal freedom in for the sake of the reassuring certainty of subordination. AI offers a modern method of surrendering the burden of having to think and choose.

The Black Box Problem: Trust Without Understanding

AI's greatest allure is its ability to accomplish things outside human capability – sifting through oceans of data at unprecedented speed. Stuck in the car in Marseille, this was, after all, why I opted to trust the app over my companion (a decision she interpreted as an affront). With access to all the data, surely the app had superior insight – or so I thought.

The core issue is that AI operates as a black box. It generates knowledge, but without necessarily deepening human comprehension. We do not truly know the process behind its conclusions – even its creators 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 domain of belief. In dubio pro machina: when in doubt, trust the machine – that may become our 21st-century credo.

Using Without Losing: The Critical Balance

AI can be a powerful tool for humanity in scientific pursuit. It can help inventing drugs, free us from "bullshit jobs", or handle administrative chores – work that demand little thought and are unfulfilling. This is beneficial. But Kant and his contemporaries did not champion reason over faith just so humans could assemble better furniture or have more leisure. Critical thinking was not merely about efficiency – it was a practice of freedom and human self-determination.

Human thought is inherently messy and fallible, but it forces us to argue, to doubt, to challenge concepts – and to acknowledge the boundaries of our own understanding. It fosters self-reliance, both individually and as a society. For Kant, the use of reason was never only about acquiring knowledge; it was about empowering people to become authors of their own destinies, and to oppose domination. It was about creating a moral community grounded in the shared principle of rational discourse, rather than blind belief.

With all the undeniable benefits AI brings, the paramount challenge is this: how can we leverage its potential of superhuman intelligence without undermining human reasoning, the bedrock of the Enlightenment and of liberal democracy itself? That is likely one of the defining questions of our century. It is a question we would do well not to delegate to the algorithm.