Our king, our priest, our feudal lord - how AI is taking us back to the dark ages [View all]

[dalton99a]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/26/ai-dark-ages-enlightenment

Our king, our priest, our feudal lord – how AI is taking us back to the dark ages
Since the Enlightenment, we’ve been making our own decisions. But now AI may be about to change that
Joseph de Weck
Fri 26 Dec 2025 00.00 EST

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AI’s greatest allure is that it can do things our minds can’t – sift through oceans of data and process it at unprecedented speed. Sitting in the car in Marseille, this was, after all, why I chose to trust the machine instead of my friend in the passenger seat (a decision she took as an insult). With access to all the data, surely the app must know best – or so I thought.

The problem is that AI is a black box. It produces knowledge, but without necessarily deepening human understanding. We don’t really know how AI reaches its conclusions – even the programmers admit as much. Nor can we verify its reasoning against clear, objective criteria. So when we follow AI’s advice, we are not guided by reason. 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.

AI can be a formidable ally to humans in rational inquiry. It can help us invent drugs, or free us from “bullshit jobs”, or doing our taxes – tasks that demand little thought and offer little satisfaction. All the better. But Kant and his contemporaries did not plead the case of reason over faith just so humans could build better shelves or have more spare time. Critical thinking was not just about efficiency – it was a practice of freedom and human emancipation.

Human thinking is messy and full of errors, but it forces us to debate, to doubt, to test ideas against one another – and to recognise the limits of our own understanding. It builds confidence, both individually and collectively. For Kant, the exercise of reason 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 grounded in the shared principle of reason and debate, rather than blind belief.

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