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This recent season, I was caught in gridlocked traffic on the sweltering streets of a southern French city. At an intersection, my companion in the passenger seat suggested a right turn toward a renowned spot for fish soup. However, the navigation app on my phone commanded us to go forward. Fatigued and overheated, I followed the app's directive. Minutes later, we were stranded at a construction site.

A seemingly trivial incident, perhaps. But one that encapsulates a central dilemma of our era, where digital tools touches nearly every facet of our lives: who gets our trust to a greater degree – other people and our personal instincts, or the algorithm?

A Call for Intellectual Maturity and Our Modern Relapse

The renowned German philosopher Immanuel Kant famously described the Enlightenment as "humanity's emergence from its self-inflicted immaturity." This immaturity, he wrote, "represents the incapacity to use one's own understanding without guidance from another." For centuries, that guiding "other" for society was often the priest, the monarch, or the feudal lord – entities purporting to speak for divine will. To explain natural events like changing seasons, people looked for explanations in theology. In organizing 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 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 emerged: logic would supplant superstition, and the human mind, freed from authority, would become the engine of progress and a more ethical world.

Now, two and a half centuries later, one might question if we are quietly regressing into a state of intellectual immaturity. An app suggesting a direction is merely the start. AI risks becoming our contemporary authority – a unseen guide that steers our decisions and behaviors. We are in danger of ceding the hard-won autonomy to think independently – and this time, not to deities or rulers, but to computer programs.

The Rapid Rise and Subtle Dangers of Algorithmic Reliance

ChatGPT debuted only in 2022, and already a global survey indicated that an vast number of people had engaged with artificial intelligence in the preceding half-year. Whether contemplating a breakup or selecting a vote, individuals are looking to algorithms for guidance. Data suggests a significant portion of user prompts relate to personal life matters. Even more intriguing than our reliance on AI for judgment is what happens when we allow it express for us. Writing is now one of the most common uses for tools like ChatGPT, second only to everyday tasks. The late American author Joan Didion once remarked, “I write purely to discover what I am thinking.” What transpires when we stop composing? Do we cease discovering?

Worryingly, emerging research suggests the answer may be yes. A study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used brain monitoring to track the cognitive activity of essay writers who had could use AI, traditional search engines, or no aids. Those who could use AI displayed the lowest brain activity and had difficulty accurately recalling their own work. Perhaps most troubling was that over time, participants in the AI group became increasingly reliant, pasting entire blocks of text.

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

Certainly, AI's appeal lies in its convenience. It is fast, reduces effort and – importantly – offers a new method to abdicate responsibility. In his 1941 book, Escape from Freedom, the German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm proposed that the rise of fascism could be understood by a preference to give up personal freedom in exchange for the reassuring certainty of obedience. AI offers a modern avenue for surrendering 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 beyond our minds – analyzing oceans of data at unprecedented speed. Stuck in the car in Marseille, this was, ultimately, why I chose to believe the machine over my friend (a decision she interpreted as an insult). With access to all the data, surely the algorithm had superior insight – or so I believed.

The fundamental problem is that AI is a opaque system. It generates answers, but not always deepening human understanding. We do not truly know how AI reaches its decisions – even its creators acknowledge the opacity. Nor can we verify its reasoning against clear, objective criteria. So when we heed AI's recommendation, we are not being led by logic. We are back in the domain of belief. In dubio pro machina: when in doubt, trust the machine – that may become our 21st-century guiding principle.

Using Without Losing: The Critical Balance

AI can be a powerful tool for humanity in rational inquiry. It can help medical research, liberate us from "bullshit jobs", or handle taxes – duties that demand little thought and offer little satisfaction. This is beneficial. But Kant and his contemporaries did not champion reason over faith just so humans could optimize chores or have more leisure. Critical thinking was not merely about productivity – it was a discipline of freedom and human emancipation.

Human thought is inherently messy and fallible, but it compels us to debate, to doubt, to challenge concepts – and to recognize the boundaries of our own knowledge. It fosters confidence, both personally and collectively. 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 domination. It was about creating a moral community based on the common foundation of reason and debate, rather than unquestioning acceptance.

With all the undeniable benefits AI offers, the key question remains: how can we harness its potential of superhuman intelligence without undermining human rationality, the bedrock of the Enlightenment and of free societies itself? That is likely one of the central dilemmas of our century. It is a question we must strive not to outsource to the machine.