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This recent season, I found myself navigating in congested traffic on the scorching streets of Marseille. At an intersection, my friend in the passenger seat advised a right turn toward a famous spot for fish soup. Yet, the navigation app on my phone instructed us to go forward. Fatigued and overheated, I followed the algorithm's advice. Moments later, we were stranded at a roadwork site.

A seemingly trivial event, perhaps. But one that captures a defining dilemma of our time, where technology permeates almost every aspect of existence: who gets our trust to a greater degree – fellow humans and our own intuition, or the machine?

A Call for Intellectual Maturity and A Contemporary Backslide

The renowned German philosopher Immanuel Kant once defined the Enlightenment as "man's release from its self-inflicted immaturity." This state, he argued, "is the inability to use one's personal reason without guidance from another." For ages, that guiding "other" for human thought was frequently the clergyman, the king, or the feudal lord – entities claiming to speak for divine will. To comprehend phenomena like volcanic eruptions, people looked for explanations in theology. In shaping the social world, from economics to matters of the heart, faith acted as the primary guide.

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

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

Now, 250 years later, one might wonder if we are quietly regressing into a state of intellectual immaturity. An app dictating a direction is merely the start. AI risks becoming our contemporary authority – a unseen guide that steers our choices and behaviors. We risk ceding the hard-won autonomy to reason for ourselves – and now, not to deities or rulers, but to lines of code.

The Rapid Rise and Subtle Dangers of AI Dependence

ChatGPT was launched a mere three years ago, and yet a global survey indicated that an vast number of respondents had used AI in the preceding half-year. Whether contemplating a breakup or choosing a candidate, individuals are looking to algorithms for guidance. Research suggests a large majority of user prompts relate to personal life matters. Even more striking than our use of AI for judgment is what occurs when we allow it speak for us. Writing is now one of the most common uses for generative AI, just behind everyday tasks. The celebrated American author Joan Didion famously said, “I write entirely to find out what I am thinking.” What occurs when we stop composing? Do we cease discovering?

Alarmingly, emerging research suggests the outcome 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, traditional search engines, or no aids. Those who could rely on AI displayed the least cognitive engagement and had difficulty quoting their own work. Perhaps most concerning was that over time, participants in the AI group became progressively lazier, copying entire blocks of text.

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

Of course, AI's attraction stems from its convenience. It is fast, reduces effort and – critically – offers a new method to offload accountability. In his 1941 book, Escape from Freedom, the German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm proposed that the appeal of authoritarianism could be understood by a preference to surrender autonomy in for the sake of the comforting security of subordination. AI offers a digital avenue for 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 beyond our minds – analyzing oceans of data at lightning pace. Sitting in the car in Marseille, this was, after all, why I chose to believe the machine over my friend (a decision she interpreted as an insult). With knowledge of all the data, surely the app had superior insight – or so I believed.

The fundamental problem is that AI operates as a black box. It produces knowledge, but not always fostering human understanding. We do not truly know how AI reaches its conclusions – including its programmers acknowledge the opacity. Nor can we check its logic against transparent standards. So when we heed AI's advice, we are not being led by logic. We are returning to the domain of faith. In dubio pro machina: when in doubt, trust the machine – that may become our 21st-century guiding principle.

Using Without Losing: The Essential Challenge

AI can be a formidable ally for humanity in rational inquiry. It can help medical research, liberate us from tedious tasks, or handle administrative chores – work that are repetitive 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 more leisure. Critical thinking was not merely about productivity – it was a discipline of liberty and human emancipation.

Human thought is often chaotic and fallible, but it forces us to debate, to question, to test ideas – and to acknowledge the boundaries of our own understanding. It fosters confidence, both personally and as a society. For Kant, the use of reason was never only about acquiring knowledge; it was about enabling people to become agents of their own destinies, and to resist domination. It was about building a moral community grounded in the shared principle of reason and debate, rather than unquestioning acceptance.

With all the undeniable benefits AI offers, the paramount challenge is this: how can we harness its promise of superhuman intelligence without eroding human rationality, the cornerstone of the Enlightenment and of liberal democracy themselves? That is likely one of the central dilemmas of our time. It is a question we must strive not to outsource to the machine.