TeaThat summer, I found myself battling traffic on the sweltering streets of Marseille. At a crossing, my friend sitting in the passenger seat asked me to turn right towards a place famous for fish soup. But navigation app Waze directed us to go straight. Tired, and feeling like a sauna on Renault wheels, I followed Waze’s advice. A few moments later, we got stuck at a construction site.
Maybe a simple moment. But which perhaps captures the defining question of our era, in which technology touches nearly every aspect of our lives: Who do we trust more – other humans and our own instincts, or the machine?
German philosopher Immanuel Kant famously defined the enlightenment As “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity”. Immaturity, he wrote, “is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.” For centuries, that “other” who directed human thought and life was often the priest, the king, or the feudal lord—who claimed to act as the voice of God on earth. In trying to understand natural phenomena – why volcanoes erupt, why the seasons change – humans look to God for answers. In shaping the social world, from economics to love, religion served as our guide.
Kant argued that humans always have the capacity to reason. He didn’t always have the confidence to use it. But with the American and later the French Revolution, a new era was dawning: reason would replace faith, and the human mind, freed from authority, would become the engine of progress and a more moral world. ,snake charmer oudeOr “Have the courage to use your understanding!”, Kant urged his contemporaries.
After two and a half centuries, one might wonder whether we are quietly slipping back into immaturity. It’s one thing for an app to tell us which path to take. But artificial intelligence threatens to become our new “other” – a silent authority that guides our thoughts and actions. We are in danger of losing our hard-earned courage to think for ourselves – and this time, not for gods or kings, but for codes.
ChatGPT was launched only three years ago, and a global survey published in April found that 82% of respondents had used AI In the last six months. Whether deciding whether to end a relationship or who to vote for, people are turning to machines for advice. According to OpenAI, 73% of users indicate Worry about non-work-related topicsWhat’s even more interesting than our reliance on AI’s judgment in daily life is what happens when we let it speak for us, Writing is now one of the most common uses of ChatGPAT, second only to practical requests such as DIY or cooking advice, American writer Joan Didion once said: “I write solely to know what I’m thinking.” What happens when we stop writing? Should we stop finding out?
Worryingly, some evidence suggests the answer may be yes. A study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used electroencephalography (EEG) to monitor brain activity of essay writers Given access to AI, search engines like Google, or nothing. Those who could trust AI showed the lowest cognitive activity and struggled to accurately cite their work. Perhaps most worryingly, over a few months, participants in the AI group became increasingly lazy, and began copying entire blocks of text in their essays.
The study is short and incomplete, but Kant may have recognized the pattern. “Laziness and cowardice,” he wrote, “are the reasons why such a large proportion of men…remain in lifelong immaturity, and why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as their protectors. It is so easy to be immature.”
Of course, the appeal of AI lies in its convenience. It saves time, saves effort and – importantly – provides a new way of relieving responsibility. In his 1941 book, Escape from Freedom, the German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm argued that the rise of fascism could be explained in part by people preferring to surrender their freedom in exchange for the reassuring certainty of subjugation. AI provides a new way to relieve the burden of thinking and making decisions on your own.
The biggest attraction of AI is that it can do what our brains cannot do – sift through oceans of data and process it at unprecedented speed. Sitting in the car in Marseille, after all, this was the reason I chose to trust the machine rather than my friend in the passenger seat (a decision he took as an insult). With access to all the data, surely the app should know best – or so I thought.
The problem is that AI is a black box. It produces knowledge, but without deepening human understanding. We don’t really know how AI reaches its conclusions – even programmers admit this. Nor can we verify its logic against clear, objective criteria. So when we follow AI’s advice, we are not guided by logic. We are back in the circle of trust. in dubio Pro Machine: When in doubt, trust the machine – this could become our guiding principle of the future.
AI can be a formidable ally to humans in rational inquiry. It could help us invent medicines, or free us from “nonsense chores,” or help us do our taxes – tasks that require less thought and yield less satisfaction. Even better. But Kant and his contemporaries did not advocate reason over faith just so humans could build better cabinets or have more free time. Critical thinking was not just about efficiency – it was the exercise of freedom and human liberation.
Human thinking is messy and full of errors, but it forces us to debate, doubt, test ideas against each other, and recognize the limits of our understanding. It creates confidence individually and collectively. For Kant, the practice of logic was never just about knowledge; It was about enabling people to become agents of their own lives and resist domination. It was about building a moral community based on a shared principle of reason and debate rather than blind faith.
With all the benefits AI has to offer, the challenge is: How can we harness its promise of superhuman intelligence without destroying the cornerstone of human reason, enlightenment, and liberal democracy? This may be one of the defining questions of the 21st century. We’d better not hand it over to the machine.
