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This recent season, I found myself navigating in congested traffic on the scorching streets of a southern French city. At a crossing, my companion in the front seat suggested a right turn toward a famous spot for fish soup. However, the digital guide on my phone instructed us to go forward. Fatigued and overheated, I followed the algorithm's directive. Moments later, we were stuck at a roadwork site.

A minor event, perhaps. But one that encapsulates a defining question of our era, where technology permeates almost every aspect of existence: who gets our trust more – other people and our personal instincts, 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 nonage." This state, he wrote, "is the incapacity to use one's own understanding without direction from an external source." For ages, that directing force for human thought was frequently the priest, the king, or the landowner – figures claiming to channel God's voice. To explain phenomena like volcanic eruptions, people looked for explanations in religion. In shaping the fabric of society, from commerce to love, religious doctrine acted as the primary guide.

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

Kant argued that humans had the ability to think rationally. They just didn't have the confidence to employ it. With upheavals in the 18th century, a fresh era emerged: logic would supplant superstition, and the human mind, freed from dogma, would become the engine of advancement and a more ethical world.

Today, 250 years later, one might wonder if we are quietly regressing 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 steers our choices and behaviors. We are in danger of relinquishing the hard-won courage to reason for ourselves – and this time, not to gods or kings, but to computer programs.

The Rapid Rise and Subtle Dangers of Algorithmic Reliance

ChatGPT was launched a mere three years ago, and already a recent study indicated that an vast number of people had engaged with artificial intelligence in the preceding half-year. Whether deciding on ending a relationship or selecting a vote, individuals are looking to algorithms for guidance. Research suggests a large majority of user queries relate to non-work topics. Even more intriguing than our reliance on AI for judgment is what occurs when we let it speak for us. Writing is now among the most common uses for generative AI, just behind practical requests. The celebrated American author Joan Didion once remarked, “I write entirely to find out what I am thinking.” What transpires when we cease writing? Do we cease discovering?

Alarmingly, emerging research hints the outcome may be affirmative. A study conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used brain monitoring to track the cognitive activity of participants who had access to AI, traditional search engines, or no aids. Those who could use AI displayed the least brain activity and had trouble quoting 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 many of men … stay in perpetual nonage.”

Certainly, AI's attraction lies in its efficiency. It is fast, reduces effort and – critically – offers a new method to abdicate responsibility. In his 1941 book, Escape from Freedom, the German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm argued that the appeal of authoritarianism could be partly explained by a preference to surrender autonomy in exchange for the reassuring certainty of obedience. AI presents a digital method of relinquishing the weight of having to think and choose.

The Black Box Problem: Faith Over Reason

AI's primary draw is its ability to accomplish things outside our minds – sifting through oceans of data at unprecedented speed. Stuck in the car in Marseille, this was, after all, why I opted to believe the machine over my friend (a choice she took as an affront). With access to real-time information, certainly the algorithm must know best – or so I thought.

The fundamental problem is that AI is a opaque system. It generates knowledge, but without necessarily fostering human understanding. We cannot fully grasp the process behind its conclusions – even its creators admit this. Nor can we check its logic against transparent standards. So when we follow AI's advice, we are not being guided by reason. We are back in the realm of belief. In dubio pro machina: when in doubt, trust the machine – that may become our future guiding principle.

Harnessing Without Eroding: The Essential Challenge

AI can be a formidable ally for mankind in scientific pursuit. It can aid in 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 enlightenment just so humans could optimize chores or have extra free time. Independent thought was not just about productivity – it was a discipline of freedom and human self-determination.

Human thought is often chaotic and fallible, but it compels us to debate, to doubt, to challenge concepts – and to recognize the limits of our own understanding. It fosters self-reliance, both personally and collectively. For Kant, the exercise of reason was never only about information; it was about enabling people to become authors of their own lives, and to oppose domination. It was about creating a ethical society grounded in the shared principle of rational discourse, rather than blind belief.

With all the undeniable benefits AI brings, the paramount challenge is this: how can we leverage its promise of superhuman intelligence without undermining human rationality, the cornerstone of the Enlightenment and of liberal democracy itself? That may be one of the defining questions of our century. It is a question we would do well not to outsource to the algorithm.