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This past summer, I found myself navigating in gridlocked traffic on the scorching streets of a southern French city. At a crossing, my friend in the front seat suggested a right turn toward a renowned spot for bouillabaisse. However, the navigation app on my phone instructed us to continue straight. Weary and overheated, I heeded the app's directive. Minutes later, we were stuck at a roadwork site.

A minor event, maybe. But one that encapsulates a defining question of our time, where technology permeates nearly every facet of existence: whom do we trust more – other people and our own intuition, or the machine?

The Enlightenment's Promise and A Contemporary Backslide

The influential German philosopher Immanuel Kant famously described the Enlightenment as "man's release from its self-imposed nonage." This state, he wrote, "is the incapacity to use one's personal reason without direction from an external source." For ages, that guiding "other" for human thought was frequently the clergyman, the monarch, or the landowner – figures claiming to channel God's voice. To explain natural events like volcanic eruptions, people looked for explanations in theology. In organizing the social world, from economics to matters of the heart, religious doctrine served as the main compass.

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

Kant argued that humans always possessed the ability to think rationally. They just didn't have the boldness to employ it. With upheavals in the 18th century, a fresh era emerged: logic would supplant superstition, and the intellect, freed from authority, would become the engine of progress and a better world.

Today, two and a half centuries later, one might wonder if we are quietly regressing into a form of intellectual immaturity. An app suggesting a driving route is just one example. Artificial intelligence threatens to become our new "other" – a unseen guide that steers our choices and behaviors. We risk ceding the historically earned autonomy to reason for ourselves – and now, not to gods or kings, but to lines of code.

The Rapid Rise and Hidden Risks of Algorithmic Reliance

ChatGPT debuted only in 2022, and yet a global survey indicated that an overwhelming majority of people had used AI in the preceding half-year. Whether deciding on a breakup or choosing a candidate, individuals are looking to machines for counsel. Research suggests a large majority of user prompts concern non-work topics. Even more intriguing than our reliance on AI for judgment is what happens when we let it speak for us. Composition is now among the top uses for tools like ChatGPT, second only to everyday tasks. The late American author Joan Didion famously said, “I write purely to discover what I am thinking.” What occurs when we stop composing? Do we cease discovering?

Alarmingly, emerging research suggests the outcome may be affirmative. A study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used electroencephalography to track the mental engagement of essay writers who had access to AI, traditional search engines, or no aids. Those who could rely on AI showed the lowest cognitive engagement and had difficulty quoting their own work. Maybe most troubling was that after a few months, participants in the AI group became progressively lazier, copying large sections of text.

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

Certainly, AI's attraction lies in its efficiency. It saves time, minimizes work and – importantly – 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 surrender personal freedom in for the sake of the reassuring certainty of subordination. AI offers a digital method of surrendering the weight of having to think and choose.

The Opacity Dilemma: Trust Without Understanding

AI's greatest allure is its ability to perform tasks outside human capability – analyzing oceans of data at lightning pace. Sitting in the car in Marseille, this was, after all, why I opted to believe the machine over my friend (a choice she interpreted as an affront). With knowledge of real-time information, certainly the app must know best – or so I believed.

The core issue is that AI is a opaque system. It generates answers, but not always fostering human comprehension. We cannot fully grasp how AI reaches its conclusions – even its programmers admit this. Nor can we verify its reasoning against clear, objective criteria. So when we heed AI's advice, we are not being led by logic. We are returning to the realm of faith. In dubio pro machina: when in doubt, side with the machine – that may become our future 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, liberate us from tedious tasks, or handle taxes – duties that demand little thought and offer little satisfaction. All to the good. But Kant and his contemporaries did not advocate for reason over faith just so humans could optimize chores or have extra free time. Independent thought was not merely about productivity – it was a discipline of freedom and human emancipation.

Human thought is inherently messy and fallible, but it forces us to argue, to question, to challenge concepts – and to acknowledge the limits of our own understanding. It builds confidence, both personally and as a society. For Kant, the exercise 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 building a ethical society based on the shared principle of rational discourse, rather than blind belief.

With all the undeniable benefits AI offers, the paramount challenge is this: how can we harness its promise of advanced capability without undermining human rationality, the cornerstone of the Enlightenment and of liberal democracy itself? That may be one of the central dilemmas of our century. It is a question we would do well not to outsource to the machine.