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This recent season, I was caught in gridlocked traffic on the scorching streets of a southern French city. At a crossing, my friend in the passenger seat advised a right turn toward a famous spot for bouillabaisse. Yet, the navigation app on my phone instructed us to continue straight. Weary and in a stifling car, I followed the app's advice. Moments later, we were stuck at a construction site.

A minor incident, perhaps. But one that captures a central dilemma of our era, where digital tools touches nearly every facet of existence: who gets our trust more – other people and our own intuition, or the algorithm?

A Call for Intellectual Maturity and Our Modern Relapse

The influential German philosopher Immanuel Kant once defined the Enlightenment as "humanity's emergence from its self-inflicted immaturity." This immaturity, he wrote, "is the inability to use one's own understanding without direction from another." For ages, that directing force for human thought was frequently the priest, the monarch, or the landowner – figures purporting to channel divine will. To explain natural events like changing seasons, people sought answers in religion. In organizing the social world, from economics to love, religious doctrine acted as the primary guide.

“Sapere aude!” or “Dare to use your reason!”

Kant maintained that humans always possessed the capacity for reason. They just didn't have the confidence to employ it. With upheavals in America and France, a fresh era arrived: reason would supplant blind faith, 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 state of dependency. An app suggesting a driving route is just one example. Artificial intelligence threatens to become our contemporary authority – a unseen overseer that influences our choices and actions. We are in danger of relinquishing the historically earned courage to reason for ourselves – and this time, not to gods or kings, but to lines of code.

The Swift Adoption and Hidden Risks of AI Dependence

ChatGPT debuted only in 2022, and yet a recent study found that an vast number of respondents had engaged with artificial intelligence in the preceding half-year. Whether contemplating ending a relationship or selecting a vote, individuals are looking to algorithms for guidance. Research suggests a significant portion of user prompts relate to non-work topics. Even more striking than our use of AI for advice is what happens when we allow it express for us. Composition is now among the top uses for tools like ChatGPT, just behind everyday tasks. The celebrated American author Joan Didion once remarked, “I write purely to find out what I am thinking.” What transpires when we stop composing? Do we cease discovering?

Worryingly, emerging research hints the answer may be yes. A study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used brain monitoring to track the cognitive activity of participants who had could use AI, Google, or no aids. Those who could rely on AI displayed the lowest brain activity and had difficulty accurately recalling their own work. Perhaps most concerning was that after a few months, 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 … stay in lifelong immaturity.”

Certainly, AI's attraction lies in its efficiency. It saves time, 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 preference to give up personal freedom in exchange for the comforting security of subordination. AI offers a digital method of surrendering the weight of having to think and choose.

The Opacity Dilemma: Faith Over Reason

AI's primary draw is its ability to perform tasks outside our minds – analyzing vast datasets at lightning pace. Sitting in the car in Marseille, this was, after all, why I opted to trust the machine over my friend (a decision she took as an insult). With knowledge of real-time information, certainly the algorithm must know best – or so I believed.

The core issue is that AI operates as a black box. It generates answers, but not always fostering human understanding. We cannot fully grasp the process behind its decisions – including its creators acknowledge the opacity. Nor can we verify its logic against clear, objective criteria. So when we follow AI's recommendation, 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 may become our 21st-century credo.

Using Without Losing: The Critical Balance

AI can be a formidable ally for mankind in rational inquiry. It can aid in inventing drugs, liberate us from tedious tasks, or handle taxes – duties that demand little thought and offer little satisfaction. This is beneficial. But Kant and his peers did not advocate for reason over faith just so humans could optimize chores or have more leisure. Independent thought was not merely about efficiency – it was a discipline of freedom and human emancipation.

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 fosters self-reliance, both personally and collectively. For Kant, the exercise of reason was never solely about acquiring knowledge; it was about enabling people to become agents of their own lives, and to oppose domination. It was about creating a moral community based on the common foundation of rational discourse, rather than blind belief.

With all the advantages AI offers, the key question remains: how can we harness its promise of advanced capability without eroding human reasoning, the cornerstone of the Enlightenment and of liberal democracy themselves? That is likely one of the central dilemmas of our century. It is a question we must strive not to outsource to the algorithm.