Our King, Our Priest, Our Feudal Lord – The Way AI Returns Us to the Dark Ages.

This past summer, I found myself navigating in congested traffic on the sweltering streets of Marseille. At a crossing, my companion in the passenger seat advised 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 algorithm's directive. Minutes later, we were stranded at a construction site.

A seemingly trivial incident, maybe. But one that encapsulates a defining dilemma of our era, where digital tools permeates nearly every facet of our lives: who gets our trust to a greater degree – other people and our own intuition, or the machine?

The Enlightenment's Promise and Our Modern Relapse

The influential German philosopher Immanuel Kant once defined the Enlightenment as "humanity's emergence from its self-imposed nonage." This immaturity, he wrote, "is the incapacity to use one's own understanding without guidance from an external source." For ages, that directing force for human thought was frequently the priest, the king, or the feudal lord – entities purporting to speak for divine will. To explain phenomena like changing seasons, 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 “Dare to use your own understanding!”

Kant argued that humans had the ability to think rationally. They simply lacked the confidence to employ it. With upheavals in the 18th century, a new dawn emerged: reason would supplant blind faith, and the intellect, liberated from dogma, would become the engine of progress and a more ethical world.

Today, two and a half centuries later, one might question if we are quietly regressing into a state of intellectual immaturity. An app dictating a driving route is just one example. Artificial intelligence risks becoming our new "other" – a unseen overseer that steers our choices and actions. We are in danger of relinquishing the historically earned courage to reason for ourselves – and this time, not to gods or kings, but to lines of code.

The Swift Adoption and Subtle Dangers of AI Dependence

ChatGPT debuted a mere three years ago, and already a recent study found that an overwhelming majority of respondents had engaged with artificial intelligence in the preceding half-year. Whether deciding on a breakup or choosing a candidate, individuals are looking to machines for counsel. Research suggests a significant portion of user prompts concern non-work topics. Even more intriguing than our use of AI for advice is what occurs when we allow it express for us. Writing is now one of the top uses for tools like ChatGPT, second only to practical requests. The late American author Joan Didion famously said, “I write purely to find out what I am thinking.” What occurs when we stop composing? Do we cease discovering?

Alarmingly, some evidence hints the answer may be affirmative. A study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used brain monitoring to track the cognitive activity of essay writers who had could use AI, traditional search engines, or no aids. Those who could rely on AI displayed the least cognitive engagement and had trouble accurately recalling their own work. Maybe most troubling was that over time, individuals in the AI group became progressively lazier, copying entire blocks of text.

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

Certainly, AI's appeal stems from its convenience. It is fast, reduces effort and – importantly – offers a novel way to abdicate accountability. 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 personal freedom in exchange for the comforting security of subordination. AI offers a digital method of relinquishing the burden of having to think and choose.

The Opacity Dilemma: Trust Without Understanding

AI's primary draw is its capacity to accomplish things outside human capability – analyzing oceans of data at unprecedented speed. Sitting in the car in Marseille, this was, ultimately, why I chose to trust the machine over my friend (a decision she took as an insult). With access to all the data, surely the algorithm must know best – or so I thought.

The core issue is that AI operates as a opaque system. It generates answers, but without necessarily fostering human understanding. We cannot fully grasp how AI reaches its conclusions – even its creators acknowledge the opacity. Nor can we verify its logic against transparent standards. So when we follow AI's recommendation, we are not being led by logic. We are back in the domain of belief. In dubio pro machina: when in doubt, side with the machine – that could be our future guiding principle.

Using Without Losing: The Critical Balance

AI can be a powerful tool for mankind in scientific pursuit. It can help inventing drugs, free us from "bullshit jobs", or manage taxes – work that demand little thought and offer little satisfaction. All to the good. But Kant and his peers 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 liberty and human emancipation.

Human thought is often chaotic and error-prone, but it forces us to debate, to doubt, to challenge concepts – and to recognize the limits of our own understanding. It fosters self-reliance, both individually and as a society. For Kant, the use of reason was never only about information; it was about enabling people to become agents of their own lives, and to resist control. It was about creating a ethical society grounded in the common foundation of reason and debate, rather than unquestioning acceptance.

With all the advantages AI offers, the paramount challenge remains: how can we leverage its potential of advanced capability without undermining human reasoning, the cornerstone of the Enlightenment and of liberal democracy itself? That may be one of the central dilemmas of our century. It is a question we must strive not to delegate to the machine.