Our King, Our Priest, Our Feudal Lord – How AI Is Taking Us Back to the Dark Ages.

This past summer, I found myself navigating in gridlocked traffic on the scorching streets of a southern French city. At an intersection, my companion in the passenger seat suggested a right turn toward a famous spot for bouillabaisse. However, the navigation app on my phone commanded us to continue straight. Fatigued and overheated, I followed the app's directive. Minutes later, we were stranded at a roadwork site.

A seemingly trivial incident, perhaps. But one that encapsulates a central question of our time, where digital tools touches almost every aspect of our lives: whom do we trust to a greater degree – other people and our own intuition, or the machine?

The Enlightenment's Promise and A Contemporary Backslide

The renowned German philosopher Immanuel Kant famously described the Enlightenment as "humanity's emergence from its self-imposed immaturity." This state, he argued, "represents the incapacity to use one's own understanding without guidance from an external source." For centuries, that directing force for human thought was often the priest, the king, or the landowner – entities purporting to speak for divine will. To comprehend natural events like changing seasons, people looked for explanations in religion. In organizing the social world, from commerce to love, religious doctrine acted as the primary guide.

“Sapere aude!” or “Have courage to use your reason!”

Kant maintained that humans always possessed the ability to think rationally. They just didn't have the confidence to use it. With upheavals in America and France, a fresh era emerged: logic would supplant blind faith, and the intellect, liberated from authority, would become the engine of progress and a better world.

Now, 250 years later, one might wonder if we are slipping back into a form of intellectual immaturity. An app suggesting a driving route is merely the start. AI risks becoming our new "other" – a silent overseer that influences our decisions and behaviors. We are in danger of relinquishing the historically earned autonomy to think independently – and this time, 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 already a global survey found that an overwhelming majority of respondents had used AI in the preceding half-year. Whether deciding on a breakup or choosing a candidate, individuals are looking to machines for guidance. Data suggests a significant portion of user queries relate to personal life matters. Even more intriguing than our use of AI for advice is what occurs when we let it express for us. Composition is now among the top uses for generative AI, second only to practical requests. The celebrated American author Joan Didion once remarked, “I write entirely to discover what I am thinking.” What occurs when we stop composing? Do we cease discovering?

Worryingly, emerging research suggests the answer may be yes. A study conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used brain monitoring to observe the cognitive activity of essay writers who had could use AI, Google, or nothing. Those who could rely on AI displayed the lowest cognitive engagement and had difficulty 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 … remain in lifelong immaturity.”

Of course, AI's appeal stems from its convenience. It is fast, 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 appeal of authoritarianism could be understood by a human tendency to surrender personal freedom in for the sake of the comforting security of obedience. AI presents a digital method of relinquishing the burden of having to decide for oneself.

The Opacity Dilemma: Faith Over Reason

AI's greatest allure is its ability to accomplish things outside our minds – sifting through vast datasets at lightning pace. Stuck in the car in Marseille, this was, after all, why I opted to believe the app over my companion (a choice she interpreted as an affront). With access to real-time information, certainly the app must know best – or so I thought.

The fundamental problem is that AI is a opaque system. It generates knowledge, but without necessarily fostering human comprehension. We cannot fully grasp the process behind its decisions – even its programmers acknowledge the opacity. Nor can we check its reasoning against transparent standards. So when we follow AI's advice, we are not being led by logic. We are back in the realm of faith. In dubio pro machina: when in doubt, trust the machine – that may become our future guiding principle.

Using Without Losing: The Critical Balance

AI can be a formidable ally for humanity in scientific pursuit. It can help inventing drugs, liberate us from "bullshit jobs", or manage administrative chores – work that demand little thought and are unfulfilling. All to the good. But Kant and his contemporaries did not advocate for enlightenment just so humans could optimize chores or have more leisure. Independent thought was not just about efficiency – it was a practice of liberty and human self-determination.

Human thought is inherently messy and error-prone, but it forces us to debate, to question, to test ideas – and to acknowledge the boundaries of our own understanding. It fosters confidence, both individually and as a society. For Kant, the use of reason was never solely about information; it was about enabling people to become agents of their own destinies, and to resist domination. It was about building a ethical society grounded in the shared principle of reason and debate, rather than unquestioning acceptance.

With all the advantages AI brings, the paramount challenge is this: how can we leverage its promise of advanced capability without eroding human rationality, the cornerstone of the Enlightenment and of free societies itself? That is likely one of the central dilemmas of our time. It is a question we must strive not to outsource to the machine.