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This recent season, I found myself navigating in congested traffic on the scorching streets of Marseille. At an intersection, my companion in the passenger seat suggested a right turn toward a famous spot for fish soup. Yet, the digital guide on my phone commanded us to go forward. Fatigued and in a stifling car, I followed the algorithm's directive. Minutes later, we were stranded at a roadwork site.

A seemingly trivial incident, perhaps. But one that encapsulates a central question of our time, where digital tools permeates 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-imposed immaturity." This immaturity, he wrote, "is the inability to use one's own understanding without direction from another." For centuries, that guiding "other" for human thought was often the priest, the king, or the feudal lord – entities purporting to speak for God's voice. To explain natural events like volcanic eruptions, people looked for explanations in religion. In shaping the social world, from commerce to matters of the heart, faith acted as the main compass.

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

Kant maintained that humans always possessed the capacity for reason. They just didn't have the boldness to use it. With revolutions in the 18th century, a new dawn emerged: logic would supplant blind faith, and the human mind, liberated from authority, would become the driver of progress and a more ethical world.

Now, 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 just one example. AI threatens to become our contemporary authority – a unseen overseer that steers our decisions and actions. We risk relinquishing the hard-won autonomy to think independently – and this time, not to deities or rulers, but to computer programs.

The Swift Adoption and Hidden Risks of Algorithmic Reliance

ChatGPT was launched only in 2022, and already a global survey found that an vast number of respondents had used AI in the previous six months. Whether deciding on ending a relationship or selecting a vote, individuals are looking to machines for counsel. Research suggests a large majority of user prompts relate to personal life matters. Even more striking than our reliance on AI for judgment is what happens when we let it express for us. Writing is now one of the top uses for generative AI, just behind practical requests. The late American author Joan Didion once remarked, “I write purely to find out what I am thinking.” What occurs when we stop composing? Do we lose that path?

Alarmingly, some evidence suggests the outcome may be affirmative. A study conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used electroencephalography to observe the mental engagement of participants 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 over time, individuals in the AI group grew increasingly reliant, copying large sections of text.

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

Certainly, AI's appeal stems from its convenience. It is fast, minimizes work and – critically – offers a novel way to abdicate 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 human tendency to surrender autonomy in for the sake of the reassuring certainty of subordination. AI offers a modern method of relinquishing the weight of having to think and choose.

The Black Box Problem: Faith Over Reason

AI's greatest allure is its ability to accomplish things outside human capability – sifting through oceans of data at lightning pace. Stuck in the car in Marseille, this was, ultimately, why I opted to trust the app over my companion (a choice she took as an affront). 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 generates knowledge, but not always deepening human understanding. We cannot fully grasp how AI reaches its decisions – even its programmers acknowledge the opacity. Nor can we check its reasoning against transparent standards. So when we heed AI's advice, we are not being led by logic. We are returning to the domain of belief. In dubio pro machina: when in doubt, trust the machine – that could be our future guiding principle.

Using Without Losing: The Critical Balance

AI can be a formidable ally for mankind in scientific pursuit. It can aid in inventing drugs, liberate us from "bullshit jobs", or handle administrative chores – work that demand little thought and offer little satisfaction. All to the good. But Kant and his peers did not champion reason over faith just so humans could optimize chores or have more leisure. Critical thinking 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 argue, to question, to test ideas – and to acknowledge the limits of our own knowledge. It fosters confidence, both individually and as a society. For Kant, the use of reason was never solely about information; it was about empowering people to become authors of their own lives, and to oppose control. It was about building a moral community grounded in the shared principle of rational discourse, rather than blind belief.

With all the advantages AI brings, the key question remains: how can we leverage its promise of superhuman intelligence without eroding human rationality, the bedrock of the Enlightenment and of free societies themselves? That may be one of the central dilemmas of our century. It is a question we would do well not to delegate to the machine.