🔗 Share this article

This past summer, I found myself navigating in gridlocked traffic on the scorching streets of a southern French city. At a crossing, my companion in the front seat suggested a right turn toward a famous spot for bouillabaisse. However, the digital guide on my phone commanded us to go forward. Weary and in a stifling car, I followed the app's directive. Minutes later, we were stranded at a roadwork site.

A minor event, maybe. But one that encapsulates a defining question of our era, where digital tools permeates almost every aspect of our lives: whom do we trust more – other people and our personal instincts, or the machine?

A Call for Intellectual Maturity and A Contemporary Backslide

The renowned German philosopher Immanuel Kant famously described the Enlightenment as "man's release from its self-imposed nonage." This state, he argued, "represents the incapacity to use one's personal reason without direction from another." For ages, that directing force for society was often the clergyman, the monarch, or the landowner – figures claiming to speak for God's voice. To explain natural events like volcanic eruptions, people looked for explanations in theology. In organizing the social world, from economics to love, religious doctrine acted as the primary guide.

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

Kant argued that humans always possessed the capacity for reason. They just didn't have the confidence to use it. With upheavals in the 18th century, a new dawn arrived: logic would supplant superstition, and the intellect, freed from dogma, would become the engine of progress and a better world.

Today, two and a half centuries later, one might question if we are quietly regressing into a form of dependency. An app suggesting a direction is merely the start. AI threatens to become our contemporary authority – a silent overseer that steers our decisions and behaviors. We are in danger of ceding the historically earned courage to think independently – and this time, not to deities or rulers, but to computer programs.

The Swift Adoption and Subtle Dangers of AI Dependence

ChatGPT was launched only in 2022, and yet a recent study found that an vast number of respondents had used AI in the preceding half-year. Whether deciding on a breakup or choosing a candidate, individuals are looking to algorithms for guidance. Research suggests a large majority of user queries concern non-work topics. Even more intriguing than our reliance on AI for advice is what happens when we let it express for us. Writing is now one of the most common uses for generative AI, just behind practical requests. The late American author Joan Didion once remarked, “I write purely to discover what I am thinking.” What transpires when we stop composing? Do we cease discovering?

Worryingly, emerging research suggests the outcome may be affirmative. A study conducted by 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 showed the lowest cognitive engagement and had difficulty quoting their own work. Perhaps most troubling was that over time, participants in the AI group grew progressively lazier, copying large sections of text.

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

Certainly, AI's attraction lies in its convenience. It is fast, minimizes work 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 give up autonomy in for the sake of the comforting security of subordination. AI presents a digital method of relinquishing the weight of having to decide for oneself.

The Black Box Problem: Trust Without Understanding

AI's greatest allure is its capacity to accomplish things outside our minds – sifting through oceans of data at lightning pace. Sitting in the car in Marseille, this was, after all, why I opted to trust the app over my companion (a choice she interpreted as an affront). With knowledge of real-time information, certainly the algorithm must know best – or so I thought.

The fundamental problem is that AI operates as a opaque system. It produces knowledge, but not always deepening human understanding. We cannot fully grasp the process behind its conclusions – even its creators acknowledge the opacity. Nor can we verify its reasoning against transparent standards. So when we follow AI's advice, we are not being guided by reason. We are returning to the domain of faith. In dubio pro machina: when in doubt, side with the machine – that could be our 21st-century guiding principle.

Harnessing Without Eroding: The Essential Challenge

AI can be a formidable ally for humanity in scientific pursuit. It can help medical research, liberate us from tedious tasks, or manage administrative chores – work that are repetitive and offer little satisfaction. This is beneficial. But Kant and his contemporaries did not champion reason over faith just so humans could optimize chores or have more leisure. Independent thought was not just about efficiency – it was a practice of liberty and human self-determination.

Human thought is inherently messy and fallible, but it compels us to debate, to question, to challenge concepts – and to recognize the boundaries of our own understanding. It builds confidence, both personally and collectively. For Kant, the use of reason was never solely about acquiring knowledge; it was about enabling people to become authors of their own lives, and to resist domination. It was about building a moral community based on the common foundation of reason and debate, rather than blind belief.

With all the undeniable benefits AI offers, the paramount challenge remains: how can we leverage its promise of superhuman intelligence without eroding human rationality, the cornerstone of the Enlightenment and of free societies itself? That is likely one of the central dilemmas of our century. It is a question we must strive not to outsource to the algorithm.