By Joseph de Weck
Publication Date: 2025-12-26 05:00:00
TThis summer I fought my way through traffic in the muggy streets of Marseille. At an intersection, my friend in the passenger seat asked me to turn right to a place known for its fish soup. But the navigation app Waze instructed us to drive straight ahead. Tired and with the Renault feeling like a sauna on wheels, I followed Waze’s advice. Moments later we were stuck on a construction site.
Maybe a trivial moment. But one that perhaps addresses the crucial question of our time, when technology touches almost every aspect of our lives: Who do we trust more – other people and our own instincts or the machine?
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant famously defined the Enlightenment as “man’s emergence from his self-inflicted immaturity.” Immaturity, he wrote, “is the inability to use one’s understanding without the guidance of another.” For centuries, the “other” who guided human thought and life was often the priest, the monarch or the feudal lord – the…
