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This recent season, I found myself navigating in gridlocked traffic on the sweltering streets of a southern French city. At an intersection, my friend in the passenger seat suggested a right turn toward a renowned spot for fish soup. Yet, the navigation app on my phone instructed us to continue straight. Weary and overheated, I heeded the algorithm's directive. Minutes later, we were stuck at a construction site.

A seemingly trivial event, maybe. But one that captures a central dilemma of our time, where technology permeates nearly every facet of our lives: who gets our trust to a greater degree – fellow humans and our personal instincts, or the machine?

The Enlightenment's Promise and Our Modern Relapse

The influential German philosopher Immanuel Kant once defined the Enlightenment as "humanity's emergence from its self-inflicted nonage." This immaturity, he wrote, "represents the incapacity to use one's own understanding without guidance from an external source." For ages, that directing force for human thought was frequently the priest, the monarch, or the feudal lord – entities purporting to channel divine will. To comprehend phenomena like volcanic eruptions, people looked for explanations in theology. In shaping the fabric of society, from commerce to love, faith served as the primary guide.

“Sapere aude!” or “Have courage to use your own understanding!”

Kant argued that humans had the ability to think rationally. They simply lacked the confidence to use it. With revolutions in the 18th century, a new dawn arrived: reason would supplant superstition, and the intellect, freed from authority, would become the driver of progress and a better world.

Now, two and a half centuries later, one might question if we are slipping back into a state of intellectual immaturity. An app suggesting a direction is merely the start. Artificial intelligence threatens to become our new "other" – a unseen guide that influences our decisions and behaviors. We risk relinquishing the hard-won courage to reason for ourselves – and now, not to deities or rulers, but to computer programs.

The Swift Adoption and Subtle Dangers of Algorithmic Reliance

ChatGPT debuted only in 2022, and yet a recent study found that an overwhelming majority of respondents had engaged with artificial intelligence in the preceding half-year. Whether contemplating ending a relationship or choosing a candidate, individuals are looking to algorithms for guidance. Research suggests a significant portion of user prompts concern personal life matters. Even more intriguing than our reliance on AI for judgment is what happens when we allow it speak for us. Composition is now one of the top uses for generative AI, just behind practical requests. The late American author Joan Didion once remarked, “I write entirely to find out what I am thinking.” What occurs when we stop composing? Do we cease discovering?

Worryingly, emerging research hints the answer may be affirmative. A study conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used brain monitoring to track the cognitive activity of essay writers who had could use AI, Google, or no aids. Those who could use AI showed the least cognitive engagement and had difficulty accurately recalling their own work. Perhaps most concerning was that after a few months, individuals in the AI group became progressively lazier, pasting entire blocks of text.

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

Certainly, AI's attraction lies in its convenience. It is fast, minimizes work and – critically – offers a novel way to offload responsibility. In his 1941 book, Escape from Freedom, the German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm proposed that the appeal of authoritarianism could be understood by a human tendency to give up personal freedom in exchange for the comforting security of obedience. AI offers a digital method of surrendering the weight of having to decide for oneself.

The Black Box Problem: Faith Over Reason

AI's primary draw is its ability to perform tasks beyond human capability – sifting through oceans of data at lightning pace. Sitting in the car in Marseille, this was, ultimately, why I chose to believe the app over my companion (a choice she interpreted as an insult). With knowledge of all the data, surely the app must know best – or so I thought.

The fundamental problem is that AI operates as a black box. It produces answers, but not always fostering human understanding. We do not truly know how AI reaches its decisions – including its programmers admit this. Nor can we check its logic against clear, objective criteria. So when we follow AI's advice, we are not being guided by reason. We are back in the domain of faith. In dubio pro machina: when in doubt, trust the machine – that may become our 21st-century guiding principle.

Harnessing Without Eroding: The Critical Balance

AI can be a formidable ally for humanity in rational inquiry. It can aid in medical research, free us from "bullshit jobs", or handle administrative chores – duties that demand little thought and are unfulfilling. This is beneficial. But Kant and his contemporaries did not champion reason over faith just so humans could optimize chores or have extra free time. Independent thought was not just about productivity – it was a discipline of liberty and human self-determination.

Human thought is often chaotic and error-prone, but it forces us to debate, to question, to challenge concepts – and to recognize the boundaries of our own understanding. It builds self-reliance, both individually and as a society. For Kant, the use of reason was never solely about information; it was about enabling people to become authors of their own destinies, and to resist domination. It was about building a ethical society grounded in the shared principle of rational discourse, rather than blind belief.

With all the advantages AI brings, the paramount challenge remains: how can we leverage its potential of superhuman intelligence without undermining human reasoning, the cornerstone of the Enlightenment and of free societies itself? That is likely one of the central dilemmas of our time. It is a question we would do well not to delegate to the machine.