🔗 Share this article

This recent season, I was caught in congested traffic on the scorching streets of a southern French city. At an intersection, my companion in the front seat suggested a right turn toward a famous spot for fish soup. Yet, the digital guide on my phone instructed us to continue straight. Weary and in a stifling car, I heeded the app's advice. Moments later, we were stuck at a roadwork site.

A minor incident, maybe. But one that encapsulates a defining dilemma of our time, where technology permeates almost every aspect of existence: who gets our trust to a greater degree – other people and our personal instincts, or the algorithm?

A Call for Intellectual Maturity and A Contemporary Backslide

The influential German philosopher Immanuel Kant famously described the Enlightenment as "man's release from its self-imposed immaturity." This immaturity, he wrote, "is the inability to use one's own understanding without direction from another." For ages, that directing force for society was often the priest, the monarch, or the feudal lord – entities purporting to channel God's voice. To explain phenomena like volcanic eruptions, people sought answers in religion. In shaping the social world, from economics to matters of the heart, religious doctrine served as the primary guide.

“Sapere aude!” or “Have courage 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 new dawn arrived: reason would replace blind faith, and the intellect, liberated from dogma, would become the engine of progress and a more ethical world.

Today, two and a half centuries later, one might wonder if we are slipping back into a state of dependency. An app dictating a direction is merely the start. Artificial intelligence threatens to become our contemporary authority – a silent overseer that steers our choices and behaviors. We are in danger of ceding the historically earned 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 only in 2022, and yet a global survey found that an vast number of people had used AI in the previous six months. Whether contemplating ending a relationship or choosing a candidate, individuals are looking to machines for counsel. Research suggests a significant portion of user queries concern non-work topics. Even more intriguing than our use of AI for advice is what occurs when we let it express for us. Writing is now one of the top uses for tools like ChatGPT, second only to practical requests. The late American author Joan Didion once remarked, “I write entirely to discover what I am thinking.” What transpires when we cease writing? Do we lose that path?

Alarmingly, emerging research suggests the answer may be affirmative. A study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used electroencephalography to observe the cognitive activity of participants who had could use AI, traditional search engines, or nothing. Those who could use AI showed the least brain activity and had difficulty accurately recalling their own work. Maybe most troubling was that over time, individuals in the AI group grew progressively lazier, copying large sections of text.

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

Certainly, AI's appeal stems from its efficiency. It is fast, reduces effort and – critically – offers a new method to offload responsibility. In his 1941 book, Escape from Freedom, the German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm proposed that the appeal of authoritarianism could be partly explained by a human tendency to surrender autonomy in for the sake of the comforting security of obedience. AI offers a digital avenue for surrendering the burden of having to think and choose.

The Opacity Dilemma: Faith Over Reason

AI's greatest allure is its ability to accomplish things beyond our minds – sifting through oceans of data at unprecedented speed. Sitting in the car in Marseille, this was, after all, why I opted to trust the machine over my friend (a decision she interpreted as an insult). With access to all the data, surely the algorithm had superior insight – or so I believed.

The core issue is that AI operates as a black box. It produces answers, but without necessarily fostering human understanding. We cannot fully grasp the process behind its conclusions – including its programmers acknowledge the opacity. Nor can we check its logic against clear, objective criteria. So when we follow AI's recommendation, we are not being led by logic. We are back in the domain of belief. In dubio pro machina: when in doubt, side with the machine – that could be our 21st-century credo.

Using Without Losing: The Essential Challenge

AI can be a powerful tool for humanity in scientific pursuit. It can aid in medical research, free us from "bullshit jobs", or manage taxes – duties that demand little thought and are unfulfilling. All to the good. But Kant and his contemporaries did not advocate for enlightenment just so humans could optimize chores or have extra free time. Independent thought was not merely about efficiency – it was a practice of freedom and human self-determination.

Human thought is inherently messy and error-prone, but it compels us to argue, to doubt, to challenge concepts – and to acknowledge the limits of our own understanding. It fosters self-reliance, both individually and as a society. For Kant, the exercise of reason was never solely about information; it was about empowering people to become authors of their own lives, and to oppose domination. It was about building a ethical society based on the common foundation of rational discourse, rather than unquestioning acceptance.

With all the undeniable benefits AI offers, the key question is this: how can we harness its promise of superhuman intelligence without undermining human rationality, the cornerstone of the Enlightenment and of free societies themselves? That may be one of the defining questions of our time. It is a question we would do well not to outsource to the machine.