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This recent season, I found myself navigating in gridlocked traffic on the sweltering streets of a southern French city. At an intersection, my companion in the passenger seat advised a right turn toward a famous spot for fish soup. Yet, the navigation app on my phone instructed us to continue straight. Fatigued and in a stifling car, I heeded the app's directive. Moments later, we were stranded at a construction site.

A seemingly trivial incident, maybe. But one that captures a central question of our era, where technology permeates nearly every facet of our lives: whom do we trust more – fellow humans and our own intuition, or the machine?

The Enlightenment's Promise and A Contemporary Backslide

The renowned German philosopher Immanuel Kant once defined the Enlightenment as "humanity's emergence from its self-inflicted nonage." This immaturity, he wrote, "represents the inability to use one's personal reason without direction from another." For centuries, that directing force for human thought was often the priest, the king, or the landowner – figures purporting to channel God's voice. To explain phenomena like changing seasons, people looked for explanations in theology. In organizing the fabric of society, from commerce to matters of the heart, faith served as the primary guide.

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

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 fresh era arrived: reason would supplant superstition, and the intellect, freed from dogma, would become the driver of progress and a more ethical world.

Now, two and a half centuries later, one might wonder if we are quietly regressing into a form of intellectual immaturity. An app suggesting a direction is just one example. AI threatens to become our contemporary authority – a silent overseer that influences our choices and actions. We risk ceding the historically earned courage to reason for ourselves – and now, not to gods or kings, but to lines of code.

The Swift Adoption and Hidden Risks of AI Dependence

ChatGPT was launched a mere three years ago, and yet a recent study indicated that an vast number of people had used AI in the preceding half-year. Whether deciding on a breakup or selecting a vote, individuals are increasingly turning to algorithms for guidance. Research suggests a large majority of user queries concern personal life matters. Even more striking than our reliance on AI for judgment is what occurs when we let it speak for us. Writing is now one of the most common uses for generative AI, second only to practical requests. The celebrated American author Joan Didion once remarked, “I write purely to find out what I am thinking.” What transpires when we cease writing? Do we cease discovering?

Worryingly, emerging research hints the answer may be yes. A study conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used electroencephalography to observe the mental engagement of essay writers who had access to AI, traditional search engines, or nothing. Those who could use AI showed the lowest brain activity and had difficulty quoting their own work. Perhaps most troubling was that after a few months, individuals in the AI group grew progressively lazier, copying entire blocks of text.

“Laziness and cowardice,” Kant wrote, “are the reasons why so many of men … stay in perpetual nonage.”

Of course, AI's attraction lies in its efficiency. It saves time, minimizes work and – critically – offers a new method to offload accountability. In his 1941 book, Escape from Freedom, the German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm argued that the rise of fascism could be understood by a preference to give up personal freedom in for the sake of the reassuring certainty of subordination. AI presents a modern method of surrendering the weight of having to think and choose.

The Opacity Dilemma: Trust Without Understanding

AI's primary draw is its capacity to perform tasks beyond human capability – analyzing vast datasets at unprecedented speed. Stuck in the car in Marseille, this was, after all, why I opted to believe the app over my companion (a choice she took as an insult). With access to all the data, surely the app had superior insight – or so I believed.

The core issue is that AI is a black box. It produces knowledge, but not always fostering human comprehension. We cannot fully grasp the process behind its decisions – including its programmers acknowledge the opacity. Nor can we check its reasoning against clear, objective criteria. So when we follow AI's recommendation, we are not being led by logic. We are back in 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 mankind in scientific pursuit. It can help 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 champion reason over faith just so humans could assemble better furniture or have more leisure. Critical thinking was not just about efficiency – it was a practice of freedom and human self-determination.

Human thought is inherently messy and error-prone, but it forces us to debate, to doubt, to challenge concepts – and to recognize the limits of our own knowledge. It fosters self-reliance, both personally 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 destinies, and to resist domination. It was about building a moral community based on the common foundation of rational discourse, rather than blind belief.

With all the undeniable benefits AI brings, the key question is this: how can we leverage its potential of superhuman intelligence without eroding human reasoning, the cornerstone of the Enlightenment and of free societies itself? That may be one of the central dilemmas of our time. It is a question we would do well not to delegate to the machine.