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This past summer, I found myself navigating in gridlocked traffic on the sweltering streets of a southern French city. At a crossing, my companion in the passenger seat suggested a right turn toward a renowned spot for fish soup. However, the digital guide on my phone commanded us to go forward. Fatigued and in a stifling car, I followed the app's directive. Moments later, we were stranded at a construction site.

A minor event, maybe. But one that captures a defining dilemma of our time, where technology touches almost every aspect of our lives: who gets our trust more – fellow humans and our personal instincts, or the machine?

The Enlightenment's Promise and Our Modern Relapse

The influential German philosopher Immanuel Kant famously described the Enlightenment as "man's release from its self-imposed nonage." This immaturity, he wrote, "represents the inability to use one's personal reason without direction from an external source." For centuries, that directing force for human thought was often the priest, the king, or the landowner – entities purporting to channel God's voice. To comprehend phenomena like volcanic eruptions, people looked for explanations in religion. In organizing the social world, from commerce to matters of the heart, faith acted as the primary guide.

“Sapere aude!” or “Dare to use your own understanding!”

Kant maintained that humans had the ability to think rationally. They just didn't have the confidence to use it. With revolutions in the 18th century, a new dawn arrived: reason would supplant blind faith, and the human mind, liberated from authority, would become the engine of progress and a more ethical world.

Today, 250 years later, one might wonder if we are quietly regressing into a state of intellectual immaturity. An app dictating a driving route is just one example. AI risks becoming our new "other" – a unseen overseer that influences our decisions and actions. We are in danger of relinquishing the historically earned autonomy to reason for ourselves – and this time, not to deities or rulers, but to lines of code.

The Swift Adoption and Subtle Dangers of Algorithmic Reliance

ChatGPT debuted a mere three years ago, and already a recent study found that an overwhelming majority of people had used AI in the preceding half-year. Whether deciding on a breakup or choosing a candidate, individuals are increasingly turning to machines for counsel. Research suggests a large majority of user queries concern non-work topics. Even more striking than our use of AI for advice is what happens when we let it express for us. Writing is now one of the top uses for tools like ChatGPT, just behind everyday tasks. The late American author Joan Didion famously said, “I write entirely to discover what I am thinking.” What occurs when we stop composing? Do we cease discovering?

Worryingly, some evidence hints the answer may be yes. A study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used brain monitoring to observe the cognitive activity of participants who had access to AI, traditional search engines, or no aids. Those who could rely on AI showed the lowest cognitive engagement and had trouble accurately recalling their own work. Maybe most concerning was that after a few months, individuals in the AI group became increasingly reliant, pasting large sections of text.

“Inertia and fear,” Kant wrote, “are the reasons why so great a proportion of men … stay in lifelong immaturity.”

Certainly, AI's appeal lies in its efficiency. 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 rise of fascism could be partly explained by a preference to give up personal freedom in exchange for the reassuring certainty of subordination. AI offers a digital method of relinquishing the burden of having to think and choose.

The Opacity Dilemma: Faith Over Reason

AI's primary draw is its ability to accomplish things outside our minds – analyzing oceans of data at unprecedented speed. Stuck in the car in Marseille, this was, after all, why I chose to believe the app over my friend (a choice she took as an insult). With knowledge of all the data, surely the app must know best – or so I believed.

The fundamental problem is that AI operates as a opaque system. It generates knowledge, but without necessarily deepening human understanding. We do not truly know how AI reaches its conclusions – even its creators admit this. Nor can we check its reasoning against clear, objective criteria. So when we heed AI's recommendation, we are not being led by logic. We are returning to the realm of faith. In dubio pro machina: when in doubt, trust the machine – that may become our future guiding principle.

Using Without Losing: The Critical Balance

AI can be a powerful tool for mankind in scientific pursuit. It can aid in medical research, liberate us from "bullshit jobs", 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 assemble better furniture or have more leisure. Independent thought was not just about productivity – it was a discipline of freedom and human emancipation.

Human thought is often chaotic and error-prone, but it forces us to debate, to question, to challenge concepts – and to acknowledge the limits of our own understanding. It builds self-reliance, both individually 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 lives, and to resist control. It was about building a moral community based on the shared principle of reason and debate, rather than blind belief.

With all the advantages AI offers, the key question remains: how can we harness its potential of superhuman intelligence without eroding human reasoning, the bedrock of the Enlightenment and of liberal democracy themselves? That may be one of the central dilemmas of our time. It is a question we would do well not to outsource to the machine.