🔗 Share this article

This recent season, I found myself navigating in congested traffic on the sweltering streets of a southern French city. At a crossing, my companion in the front seat advised a right turn toward a renowned spot for fish soup. Yet, the navigation app on my phone commanded us to continue straight. Fatigued and overheated, I heeded the algorithm's directive. Minutes later, we were stranded at a construction site.

A seemingly trivial incident, perhaps. But one that encapsulates a central dilemma of our era, where technology touches nearly every facet of our lives: who gets our trust to a greater degree – fellow humans and our personal instincts, or the algorithm?

A Call for Intellectual Maturity and A Contemporary Backslide

The renowned German philosopher Immanuel Kant once defined the Enlightenment as "humanity's emergence from its self-imposed nonage." This state, he wrote, "is the inability to use one's own understanding without direction from an external source." For centuries, that guiding "other" for human thought was often the clergyman, the monarch, or the feudal lord – entities purporting to channel God's voice. To comprehend phenomena like volcanic eruptions, people looked for explanations in theology. In organizing the social world, from commerce to love, religious doctrine acted as the primary guide.

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

Kant maintained that humans had the capacity for reason. They simply lacked the boldness to use it. With revolutions in America and France, a fresh era emerged: logic would replace superstition, and the human mind, liberated from authority, would become the engine of progress and a better world.

Today, two and a half centuries later, one might question if we are slipping back into a state of dependency. An app dictating a driving route is just one example. Artificial intelligence threatens to become our contemporary authority – a silent guide that influences our decisions and behaviors. We risk relinquishing the historically earned autonomy to reason for ourselves – and this time, not to deities or rulers, but to computer programs.

The Rapid Rise and Subtle Dangers of AI Dependence

ChatGPT was launched a mere three years ago, and already a global survey found that an overwhelming majority of people had used AI in the preceding half-year. Whether contemplating a breakup or selecting a vote, individuals are looking to algorithms for guidance. Data suggests a significant portion of user prompts concern non-work topics. Even more intriguing than our use of AI for advice is what happens when we allow it express for us. Writing is now one of the most common uses for tools like ChatGPT, just behind everyday tasks. The celebrated American author Joan Didion famously said, “I write purely to find out what I am thinking.” What transpires when we cease writing? Do we lose that path?

Worryingly, emerging research hints the outcome 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, Google, or nothing. Those who could use AI displayed the least brain activity and had trouble quoting their own work. Maybe most concerning was that over time, individuals in the AI group became increasingly reliant, copying large sections of text.

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

Of course, AI's attraction lies in its convenience. It saves time, reduces effort and – importantly – offers a new method 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 give up personal freedom in exchange for the reassuring certainty of obedience. AI offers a modern method of surrendering the burden of having to decide for oneself.

The Opacity Dilemma: Trust Without Understanding

AI's greatest allure is its ability to perform tasks beyond human capability – analyzing oceans of data at lightning pace. Stuck in the car in Marseille, this was, ultimately, why I chose to trust the machine over my friend (a choice she took as an affront). With access to all the data, certainly the algorithm must know best – or so I thought.

The core issue is that AI operates as a black box. It produces answers, but not always deepening human comprehension. We do not truly know the process behind its decisions – including its programmers 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.

Harnessing Without Eroding: The Essential Challenge

AI can be a formidable ally for humanity in scientific pursuit. It can aid in medical research, free us from "bullshit jobs", or handle taxes – work that demand little thought and offer little satisfaction. All to the good. But Kant and his contemporaries did not champion enlightenment just so humans could optimize chores or have extra free time. Critical thinking was not merely about efficiency – it was a discipline of liberty and human self-determination.

Human thought is inherently messy and error-prone, but it forces us to debate, to question, to challenge concepts – and to recognize the limits of our own knowledge. It builds confidence, both personally and as a society. For Kant, the exercise of reason was never solely about information; it was about enabling people to become authors of their own destinies, and to oppose control. It was about building a ethical society based on the shared principle of rational discourse, rather than blind belief.

With all the undeniable benefits AI offers, the key question remains: how can we harness its potential of superhuman intelligence without undermining human rationality, the bedrock of the Enlightenment and of free societies itself? That is likely one of the defining questions of our time. It is a question we must strive not to delegate to the algorithm.