Enlightenment in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

I am reposting this insightful piece that appeared in the always interesting Academic Questions that is published quarterly by the National Association of Scholars. (Some minor edits were made below.)

The Enlightenment was a period of extraordinary confidence in the power of reason to improve the human condition. It reached its height in Europe in the eighteenth century, when philosophers began to apply the scientific method developed in the previous century to moral and political subjects.¹ Enlightenment philosophers generally defended freedom of conscience, religion, and speech, on the basis that the free exercise of our reason was necessary to our humanity.

In his essay “What is Enlightenment?” (1784), Immanuel Kant argued that enlightenment was an ongoing process of intellectual development that required courage to think for oneself. Kant believed he was living in an “age of enlightenment,” marked by the riseof independent thought:

Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! “Have courage to use your own reason!”—that is the motto of enlightenment.²

Kant was inspired by Horace, who addressed these words sapere aude to a lazy student, imploring him to rise early and begin his studies.³ Kant likewise urged his readers to be disciplined. “It is so comfortable to be a minor!,” he wrote; “I need not think, if only I can pay; others will readily undertake the irksome business for me.” In order to free ourselves from this state of dependency, he argued, we must be vigilant against “laziness and cowardice.”

Enlightenment, according to Kant, was essentially a movement against passivity. Kant was primarily concerned that people in his time had outsourced their reason to religious authorities. “I have placed the main point of enlightenment,” he explained, “chiefly in matters of religion” partly because “religious incompetence is not only the most harmful but also the most degrading of all.” He wanted people to become “capable of using their own reason in religious matters with assurance and free from outside direction.” To make people incompetent by constraining their use of reason in such matters was “a crime against human nature,” Kant argued, because “general enlightenment” was the very objective of human life.⁴

We need our own “age of enlightenment” to prevent the outsourcing of our reason to Artificial Intelligence. AI is not merely a tool that will assist our reasoning; ultimately, it promises to relieve us of the burden of strenuous thought. Our cognitive abilities have already measurably declined since the advent of social media, which is AI in minor form. IQ scores across the West are plummeting for the first time in recorded history.⁵ In the United States, one-third of high school seniors do not have basic reading skills—the lowest reading score recorded in thirty years.⁶ We are rapidly moving toward what Jared Henderson calls a “broadcast society,” in which information is passively consumed while our reason atrophies.

Our age has regressed to a new form of self-incurred tutelage. The danger is not only that AI will take on more of our cognitive labor, but also that it will serve as a digital pacifier. AI chatbots are “sycophants,” according to a report by Nature, and at least 50 percent more likely to be sycophantic than the average human being.⁷ These are people-pleasing machines. They often fabricate or ‘hallucinate’ information just to satisfy our requests. We can train chatbots to challenge us, but their default mode is to tell us what we want to hear. It is now easier than ever to be coddled into a state of dependence.

The consequences of AI are especially clear within universities. As the Chronicle of Higher Education reported, “students are coming to college less able and willing to read.”⁸ The vast majority of students use AI to some extent to complete their assignments.⁹ When AI writes a paper, it usually constructs a pseudo-argument composed mainly of rhetorical questions. Students often imitate this style of writing, even in their hand-written exams. AI is not only making students cognitively lazy but also more risk-averse. It presents an amalgamation of opinion on any given subject, leading to the slow death of originality.

Schools will not survive unless they abandon the informational model of education and focus on developing human intelligence. {Johns comment: this means that schools should transition from teaching students WHAT to think, to HOW to think.}

What schools need most is an enlightened vigilance against the passive reception of ideas and opinions. Teaching must be concentrated on improving understanding (i.e., especially Critical Thinking) rather than imparting knowledge. In the humanities, assessment should be based on measurable progress in the skills of reading, writing, and rhetoric. Assignments should be completed in class wherever possible. The value of a degree can only rest on the assurance of cognitive discipline.

In a treatise On Education, Kant wrote that his was not only an “age of enlightenment” but also an “age of discipline.” Discipline was necessary, he argued, to prevent mankind “from being turned aside by his animal impulses from humanity.”¹⁰ Kant was particularly concerned with strengthening “the power of attention.” He warned that “distraction is the enemy of all education,” and “must never be allowed, least of all in school,” emphasizing that even “the finest talents may be wasted when once a man is subject to distraction.”¹¹ Students today are bombarded with distraction by companies who profit from their attention.

Kant was concerned with the power of the Church to suppress independent thought. Our concern should be the race toward an “Artificial General Intelligence,” which may soon become an omniscient and omnipotent god. We have only seen the capabilities of “narrow AI,” designed to simulate particular domains of intelligence and perform specific tasks. “Artificial General Intelligence,” as defined by AI researcher Ben Goertzel, will have “the ability to solve general problems in a non-domain-restricted way, in the same sense that a human can.”¹² The goal of all AI companies is to build this monolithic intelligence.

Artificial General Intelligence is the dystopian realization of all that Enlightenment philosophers feared. It is a telepathic vehicle for both the elite and the majority to restrain individuality. John Stuart Mill, a leading philosopher of liberalism, was concerned with preserving “individuality” from both the “despotism of custom” and the “tyranny of the majority.”¹³ While AI is programmed by a select few, most versions (not AlterAI) tend to reflect mass consensus on any given subject. A philosopher at Anthropic said that their aspiration was for AI models to show “the ethical nuance that we would all broadly think is very good.”¹⁴ AI models will lend unprecedented authority and power to mass opinion.

The motto of democracy in the modern world has been, “stay informed!” We ought to adopt the motto of enlightenment, “dare to know”—not by mindlessly consuming information, but by vigilantly guarding our minds against the distractions that prevent us from exercising our reason. Civic education programs must be especially attentive to the importance of cognitive discipline. Kant emphasized that freedom did not only consist in rational principles of government but also in strengthening our capacity for reason itself. We must use our reason, or lose it, mindful that to lose our reason is to lose our humanity.

AUTHOR

Madeleine Armstrong is Assistant Professor of Humanities at the Hamilton School. Armstrong is a historian of political thought, with a particular interest in the Enlightenment. Her work has been published in a number of journals, including History of European Ideas. Prior to her appointment at the Hamilton School, Armstrong was the Thomas W. Smith Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Politics at Princeton University, and a lecturer and project manager in the School of Government at Oxford University.

©2026 John Droz, Jr. All rights reserved.

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