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This recent season, I found myself navigating in gridlocked traffic on the sweltering streets of Marseille. At an intersection, my friend in the passenger seat suggested a right turn toward a renowned spot for fish soup. Yet, the digital guide on my phone instructed us to continue straight. Fatigued and in a stifling car, I heeded the app's directive. Minutes later, we were stranded at a roadwork site.

A seemingly trivial incident, perhaps. But one that captures a central dilemma of our era, where technology permeates nearly every facet of existence: who gets our trust to a greater degree – fellow humans and our personal instincts, or the machine?

A Call for Intellectual Maturity and A Contemporary Backslide

The renowned German philosopher Immanuel Kant famously described the Enlightenment as "humanity's emergence from its self-imposed nonage." This state, he wrote, "is the inability to use one's personal reason without direction from an external source." For centuries, that directing force for society was frequently the priest, the king, or the feudal lord – entities claiming to channel God's voice. To explain natural events like changing seasons, people looked for explanations in religion. In organizing the social world, from economics to love, faith served as the main compass.

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

Kant argued that humans had the capacity for reason. They simply lacked the confidence to employ it. With revolutions in America and France, a new dawn arrived: reason would replace superstition, and the intellect, liberated from dogma, would become the engine of advancement and a better world.

Today, two and a half centuries later, one might wonder if we are quietly regressing into a state of dependency. An app suggesting a driving route is merely the start. AI threatens to become our new "other" – a unseen overseer that steers our decisions and actions. We risk ceding the hard-won autonomy to think independently – and this time, not to gods or kings, but to lines of code.

The Rapid Rise and Hidden Risks of AI Dependence

ChatGPT was launched a mere three years ago, and already a global survey indicated that an vast number of respondents had engaged with artificial intelligence in the previous six months. Whether contemplating ending a relationship or choosing a candidate, individuals are increasingly turning to algorithms for guidance. Research suggests a significant portion of user prompts concern personal life matters. Even more striking than our use of AI for judgment is what happens when we allow it speak for us. Composition is now among the most common uses for tools like ChatGPT, second only to practical requests. The late American author Joan Didion famously said, “I write entirely to discover what I am thinking.” What occurs when we stop composing? Do we lose that path?

Alarmingly, emerging research hints the outcome may be yes. A study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used brain monitoring to track the mental engagement of essay writers who had could use AI, Google, 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 became progressively lazier, copying entire blocks of text.

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

Certainly, AI's appeal stems from its convenience. It saves time, minimizes work and – critically – offers a novel way to abdicate responsibility. In his 1941 book, Escape from Freedom, the German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm proposed that the rise of fascism could be partly explained by a human tendency to surrender personal freedom in for the sake of the reassuring certainty of obedience. AI offers a digital method of surrendering the burden of having to think and choose.

The Black Box Problem: Trust Without Understanding

AI's greatest allure is its ability to accomplish things outside human capability – analyzing oceans of data at lightning pace. 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, certainly the app had superior insight – or so I believed.

The fundamental problem is that AI operates as a black box. It generates knowledge, but without necessarily fostering human comprehension. We do not truly know the process behind its conclusions – even its programmers acknowledge the opacity. Nor can we check its logic against transparent standards. So when we follow AI's recommendation, we are not being guided by reason. We are returning to the domain 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 powerful tool for mankind in rational inquiry. It can aid in medical research, free us from tedious tasks, or handle taxes – duties that demand little thought and are unfulfilling. This is beneficial. But Kant and his peers did not advocate for reason over faith just so humans could assemble better furniture or have more leisure. Independent thought was not merely about efficiency – it was a practice of freedom and human self-determination.

Human thought is inherently messy and error-prone, but it compels us to debate, to question, to test ideas – and to recognize the boundaries of our own knowledge. It fosters self-reliance, both personally and as a society. For Kant, the use of reason was never only about acquiring knowledge; it was about empowering people to become agents of their own destinies, and to resist control. It was about creating a moral community based on the shared principle of reason and debate, rather than blind belief.

With all the advantages AI brings, the key question remains: how can we harness its potential of superhuman intelligence without eroding human reasoning, the cornerstone of the Enlightenment and of free societies itself? That is likely one of the defining questions of our century. It is a question we must strive not to delegate to the machine.