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This recent season, I was caught in congested traffic on the scorching streets of a southern French city. At an intersection, my friend in the front seat suggested a right turn toward a famous spot for fish soup. However, the navigation app on my phone instructed us to go forward. Fatigued and overheated, I heeded the app's directive. Moments later, we were stuck at a roadwork site.

A seemingly trivial incident, perhaps. But one that captures a central dilemma of our era, where technology permeates nearly every facet of our lives: whom do we trust to a greater degree – other people and our own intuition, or the algorithm?

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 immaturity." This immaturity, he wrote, "is the incapacity to use one's own understanding without direction from another." For centuries, that directing force for society was often the clergyman, the monarch, or the landowner – figures purporting to channel divine will. To explain natural events like volcanic eruptions, people sought answers in religion. In organizing the fabric of society, from economics to love, religious doctrine served as the primary guide.

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

Kant argued that humans always possessed the ability to think rationally. They just didn't have the confidence to employ it. With upheavals in America and France, a fresh era arrived: reason would replace superstition, and the human mind, freed from dogma, would become the driver of advancement and a better world.

Today, two and a half centuries later, one might wonder if we are slipping back into a form of intellectual immaturity. An app suggesting a direction is merely the start. AI threatens to become our contemporary authority – a unseen overseer that influences our decisions and behaviors. We risk ceding the historically earned courage to reason for ourselves – and now, not to deities or rulers, but to computer programs.

The Rapid Rise and Subtle Dangers of AI Dependence

ChatGPT was launched only in 2022, and already a recent study indicated that an overwhelming majority of people had used AI in the previous six months. Whether contemplating ending a relationship or choosing a candidate, individuals are looking to algorithms for counsel. Data suggests a significant portion of user prompts concern personal life matters. Even more striking than our reliance on 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 practical requests. The late American author Joan Didion once remarked, “I write entirely to discover what I am thinking.” What occurs when we stop composing? Do we lose that path?

Alarmingly, emerging research hints the outcome may be affirmative. A study conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used electroencephalography to track the cognitive activity of participants who had access to AI, traditional search engines, or no aids. Those who could rely on AI showed the least brain activity and had trouble quoting their own work. Perhaps most troubling was that over time, participants in the AI group became progressively lazier, pasting large sections of text.

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

Certainly, AI's appeal lies in its convenience. It is fast, reduces effort and – critically – offers a novel way to abdicate accountability. In his 1941 book, Escape from Freedom, the German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm proposed that the appeal of authoritarianism could be partly explained by a preference to give up autonomy in exchange for the comforting security of subordination. AI offers a digital method of surrendering the burden of having to think and choose.

The Black Box Problem: Faith Over Reason

AI's primary draw is its ability to perform tasks outside our minds – sifting through vast datasets at unprecedented speed. Sitting in the car in Marseille, this was, ultimately, why I opted to trust the machine over my friend (a decision she took as an affront). With knowledge of 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 generates knowledge, but not always fostering human understanding. We do not truly know the process behind its decisions – including its programmers acknowledge the opacity. Nor can we check its logic against clear, objective criteria. So when we follow AI's advice, we are not being led by logic. We are back in 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 humanity in scientific pursuit. It can aid in inventing drugs, free us from tedious tasks, or handle administrative chores – duties that are repetitive and offer little satisfaction. All to the good. But Kant and his peers did not champion enlightenment just so humans could assemble better furniture or have more leisure. Independent thought was not merely about productivity – it was a discipline of freedom and human self-determination.

Human thought is often chaotic and error-prone, but it compels us to argue, to question, to test ideas – and to recognize the limits of our own knowledge. It fosters self-reliance, both individually and as a society. For Kant, the use of reason was never solely about acquiring knowledge; it was about empowering people to become authors of their own lives, and to oppose control. It was about creating a moral community based on the shared principle of reason and debate, rather than unquestioning acceptance.

With all the undeniable benefits AI brings, the paramount challenge is this: how can we harness its promise of advanced capability without eroding human rationality, the bedrock of the Enlightenment and of free societies itself? That may be one of the defining questions of our century. It is a question we would do well not to delegate to the machine.