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This past summer, I was caught in gridlocked traffic on the scorching streets of Marseille. At an intersection, my companion in the passenger seat advised a right turn toward a famous spot for bouillabaisse. However, the digital guide on my phone commanded us to continue straight. Fatigued and overheated, I heeded the app's directive. Minutes later, we were stuck at a construction site.

A minor incident, perhaps. But one that captures a defining question of our era, where technology touches nearly every facet of existence: whom do we trust more – other people and our own intuition, or the algorithm?

A Call for Intellectual Maturity and A Contemporary Backslide

The influential German philosopher Immanuel Kant once defined the Enlightenment as "man's release from its self-inflicted immaturity." This state, he argued, "is the inability to use one's personal reason without direction from another." For ages, that guiding "other" for human thought was often the clergyman, the monarch, or the feudal lord – figures claiming to channel God's voice. To explain natural events like volcanic eruptions, people sought answers in theology. In shaping the fabric of society, from commerce to love, religious doctrine acted as the main compass.

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

Kant argued that humans had the capacity for reason. They just didn't have the boldness to use it. With revolutions in America and France, a new dawn arrived: reason would supplant superstition, and the intellect, freed from dogma, would become the driver of progress and a better world.

Today, two and a half centuries later, one might wonder if we are slipping back into a form of dependency. An app dictating a direction is merely the start. AI threatens to become our new "other" – a unseen overseer that steers our choices and behaviors. We risk ceding the hard-won courage to reason for ourselves – and this time, not to gods or kings, but to computer programs.

The Swift Adoption and Hidden Risks of AI Dependence

ChatGPT was launched a mere three years ago, and yet a recent study found that an vast number of respondents had used AI in the previous six months. Whether contemplating a breakup or choosing a candidate, individuals are looking to algorithms for guidance. Data suggests a significant portion of user prompts relate to non-work topics. Even more striking than our reliance on AI for advice is what happens when we let it express for us. Composition is now among the top uses for generative AI, just behind practical requests. The late American author Joan Didion famously said, “I write entirely to discover what I am thinking.” What transpires when we cease writing? Do we lose that path?

Worryingly, some evidence suggests the answer may be yes. A study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used electroencephalography to track the mental engagement of participants who had could use AI, traditional search engines, or nothing. Those who could rely on AI displayed the lowest cognitive engagement and had trouble quoting their own work. Maybe most concerning was that over time, participants 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 perpetual nonage.”

Certainly, AI's attraction stems from its convenience. It saves time, minimizes work and – critically – offers a new method to offload responsibility. In his 1941 book, Escape from Freedom, the German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm argued that the rise of fascism could be partly explained by a preference to surrender personal freedom in for the sake of the reassuring certainty of subordination. AI presents 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 capacity to perform tasks beyond human capability – analyzing oceans of data at lightning pace. Sitting in the car in Marseille, this was, after all, why I opted to trust the machine over my friend (a choice she interpreted as an affront). With access to real-time information, surely the app must know best – or so I believed.

The fundamental problem is that AI is a opaque system. It generates answers, but without necessarily deepening human understanding. We cannot fully grasp how AI reaches its conclusions – even its programmers acknowledge the opacity. Nor can we check its reasoning against transparent standards. So when we follow AI's recommendation, we are not being guided by reason. We are back in the domain of belief. In dubio pro machina: when in doubt, side with the machine – that may become our 21st-century guiding principle.

Harnessing Without Eroding: The Critical Balance

AI can be a powerful tool for humanity in scientific pursuit. It can aid in inventing drugs, liberate us from "bullshit jobs", or manage taxes – duties that demand little thought and are unfulfilling. All to the good. But Kant and his contemporaries did not advocate for enlightenment just so humans could assemble better furniture or have more leisure. Critical thinking was not merely about efficiency – it was a discipline of freedom 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 acknowledge the limits of our own knowledge. It fosters self-reliance, both personally and as a society. For Kant, the use of reason was never only about information; it was about empowering people to become authors of their own destinies, and to resist control. It was about creating a moral community based on the shared principle of rational discourse, rather than blind belief.

With all the advantages AI offers, the paramount challenge remains: how can we leverage its promise of advanced capability without eroding human rationality, the cornerstone of the Enlightenment and of liberal democracy itself? That may be one of the defining questions of our time. It is a question we would do well not to outsource to the machine.