Sapere Aude in the Age of AI

In 1784, Immanuel Kant defined enlightenment in a single sentence: the human being's emergence from a self-incurred immaturity, the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. The immaturity is self-incurred not because we lack the capacity to think for ourselves but because we lack the resolve and the courage to use it. His motto was sapere aude—dare to know. The guardians of the eighteenth century—the book that understood for you, the pastor with a conscience for you, the physician who judged your diet for you—made deference easy and comfortable, and the ease was precisely the danger: the faculty that is never exercised does not merely become rusty, it loses its sense of being a faculty one possesses, until the use of one's own understanding comes to feel not like the recovery of something one had but like an effort one was never equipped for. The age of large language models is