🔗 Share this article

This recent season, I found myself navigating in congested traffic on the sweltering streets of a southern French city. At an intersection, my companion in the front seat suggested a right turn toward a renowned spot for bouillabaisse. However, the digital guide on my phone instructed us to continue straight. Fatigued and overheated, I followed the app's directive. Moments later, we were stranded at a roadwork site.

A seemingly trivial incident, maybe. But one that captures a central dilemma of our era, where technology touches nearly every facet of existence: who gets our trust to a greater degree – fellow humans and our own intuition, or the algorithm?

The Enlightenment's Promise and A Contemporary Backslide

The renowned German philosopher Immanuel Kant once defined the Enlightenment as "man's release from its self-imposed immaturity." This immaturity, he argued, "is the inability to use one's personal reason without direction from another." For ages, that guiding "other" for human thought was often the clergyman, the monarch, or the feudal lord – entities claiming to channel God's voice. To comprehend natural events like volcanic eruptions, people looked for explanations in religion. In shaping the social world, from commerce to matters of the heart, faith served as the main compass.

“Sapere aude!” or “Have courage to use your own understanding!”

Kant argued that humans always possessed the ability to think rationally. They simply lacked the boldness to use it. With revolutions in America and France, a new dawn emerged: reason would replace blind faith, and the human mind, freed from dogma, would become the driver of advancement and a more ethical world.

Now, 250 years later, one might question if we are slipping back into a form of dependency. An app suggesting a direction is merely the start. AI threatens to become our new "other" – a unseen overseer that influences our decisions and behaviors. We are in danger of relinquishing the hard-won autonomy to think independently – and now, not to deities or rulers, but to lines of code.

The Rapid Rise and Subtle Dangers of Algorithmic Reliance

ChatGPT was launched only in 2022, and already a global survey found that an overwhelming majority of respondents had engaged with artificial intelligence in the previous six months. Whether deciding on ending a relationship or choosing a candidate, 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 use of AI for advice is what happens when we allow it express for us. Composition is now among the top uses for tools like ChatGPT, second only to practical requests. The celebrated American author Joan Didion famously said, “I write purely to find out what I am thinking.” What transpires when we stop composing? Do we lose that path?

Alarmingly, some evidence hints the answer may be yes. A study conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used brain monitoring to observe the cognitive activity of participants who had could use AI, Google, or nothing. Those who could rely on AI displayed the least brain activity and had trouble accurately recalling their own work. Perhaps most concerning was that after a few months, participants in the AI group became progressively lazier, pasting large sections of text.

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

Of course, AI's appeal stems from its convenience. It is fast, minimizes work and – importantly – offers a novel way to abdicate 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 give up autonomy in for the sake of the comforting security of obedience. AI offers a digital avenue for surrendering the weight of having to decide for oneself.

The Opacity Dilemma: Faith Over Reason

AI's greatest allure is its capacity to perform tasks beyond our minds – sifting through vast datasets at lightning pace. Stuck in the car in Marseille, this was, after all, why I opted to trust the machine over my companion (a choice she took as an insult). With knowledge of real-time information, surely the algorithm had superior insight – or so I believed.

The fundamental problem is that AI is a black box. It produces knowledge, but not always fostering human comprehension. We do not truly know how AI reaches its decisions – including its creators acknowledge the opacity. Nor can we verify its reasoning against transparent standards. So when we heed AI's advice, we are not being led by logic. We are back in the realm of belief. In dubio pro machina: when in doubt, trust the machine – that could be our 21st-century guiding principle.

Using Without Losing: The Critical Balance

AI can be a powerful tool for humanity in scientific pursuit. It can aid in inventing drugs, free us from tedious tasks, or manage taxes – duties that demand little thought and are unfulfilling. This is beneficial. But Kant and his peers did not advocate for enlightenment just so humans could assemble better furniture 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 argue, to question, to challenge concepts – and to acknowledge the limits of our own knowledge. It builds self-reliance, 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 destinies, and to resist domination. It was about creating a moral community grounded in the common foundation of reason and debate, rather than blind belief.

With all the advantages AI offers, the key question is this: how can we leverage its promise of superhuman intelligence without eroding human rationality, the cornerstone of the Enlightenment and of liberal democracy itself? That is likely one of the central dilemmas of our time. It is a question we would do well not to delegate to the algorithm.