Our King, Our Priest, Our Feudal Lord – The Way AI Returns Us to the Medieval Era.

This recent season, I found myself navigating in congested traffic on the sweltering streets of a southern French city. At a crossing, my friend in the front seat advised a right turn toward a renowned spot for fish soup. However, the navigation app on my phone commanded us to continue straight. Fatigued and overheated, I followed the app's advice. Minutes later, we were stuck at a construction site.

A minor incident, maybe. But one that captures a defining dilemma of our era, where technology touches almost every aspect of our lives: who gets our trust to a greater degree – fellow humans and our own intuition, or the algorithm?

A Call for Intellectual Maturity and A Contemporary Backslide

The renowned German philosopher Immanuel Kant once defined the Enlightenment as "humanity's emergence from its self-imposed immaturity." This state, he argued, "is the incapacity to use one's personal reason without guidance from an external source." For centuries, that guiding "other" for society was often the priest, the monarch, or the feudal lord – figures claiming to speak for God's voice. To explain phenomena like volcanic eruptions, people sought answers in religion. In shaping the social world, from economics to matters of the heart, religious doctrine 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 just didn't have the confidence to employ it. With revolutions in the 18th century, a new dawn arrived: reason would supplant superstition, and the intellect, liberated from dogma, would become the engine of progress and a more ethical world.

Now, 250 years later, one might wonder if we are slipping back into a state of intellectual immaturity. An app suggesting a driving route is just one example. Artificial intelligence risks becoming our contemporary authority – a unseen overseer that steers our choices and actions. We risk relinquishing the historically earned courage to reason for ourselves – and this time, not to gods or kings, but to lines of code.

The Rapid Rise and Subtle Dangers of AI Dependence

ChatGPT debuted only in 2022, and yet a recent study indicated that an overwhelming majority of people had engaged with artificial intelligence in the previous six months. Whether deciding on ending a relationship or choosing a candidate, individuals are increasingly turning to machines for guidance. Data suggests a significant portion of user prompts relate to non-work topics. Even more striking than our use of AI for advice is what happens when we let it speak for us. Composition is now one of the most common uses for tools like ChatGPT, just behind practical requests. The late 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?

Worryingly, some evidence suggests the outcome may be yes. A study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used electroencephalography to track the cognitive activity of essay writers who had could use AI, traditional search engines, or nothing. Those who could rely on AI displayed the least cognitive engagement and had difficulty quoting their own work. Maybe most troubling was that over time, participants in the AI group became increasingly reliant, pasting large sections of text.

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

Certainly, AI's attraction lies in its convenience. It saves time, minimizes work and – importantly – offers a novel way to offload accountability. In his 1941 book, Escape from Freedom, the German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm argued that the appeal of authoritarianism could be partly explained by a preference to surrender autonomy in for the sake of the comforting security of obedience. AI offers a digital method of surrendering the weight of having to think and choose.

The Opacity Dilemma: Trust Without Understanding

AI's primary draw is its capacity to accomplish things outside our minds – analyzing oceans of data at unprecedented speed. Stuck in the car in Marseille, this was, ultimately, why I opted to trust the app over my companion (a decision she interpreted as an insult). With knowledge of real-time information, surely the algorithm must know best – or so I thought.

The core issue is that AI is a opaque system. It generates answers, but not always deepening human comprehension. We cannot fully grasp how AI reaches its conclusions – even its programmers admit this. Nor can we check its logic against clear, objective criteria. So when we heed AI's advice, we are not being led by logic. We are returning to the realm 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 formidable ally for humanity in scientific pursuit. It can aid in medical research, liberate us from "bullshit jobs", or manage administrative chores – work that are repetitive and are unfulfilling. All to the good. But Kant and his peers did not advocate for reason over faith just so humans could optimize chores or have more leisure. Critical thinking was not merely about efficiency – it was a practice of freedom and human self-determination.

Human thought is inherently messy and fallible, but it forces us to argue, to doubt, to challenge concepts – and to acknowledge 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 information; it was about enabling people to become agents of their own destinies, and to resist domination. It was about creating a moral community based on the shared principle of rational discourse, rather than blind belief.

With all the advantages AI offers, the paramount challenge remains: how can we leverage its promise of advanced capability without undermining human reasoning, the bedrock of the Enlightenment and of free societies themselves? That may be one of the defining questions of our time. It is a question we must strive not to delegate to the machine.