Remember Europe in the 1700s? An age of wigs, revolutions, and a radical, electrifying idea: Human reason alone could be the architect of a better world. Philosophers like Kant issued a bold command: “Sapere aude!” (Dare to know!). It was a thrilling declaration of independence from kings, priests, and unchallenged dogma. Humanity, armed with logic and the scientific method, was stepping into the spotlight as the author of its own destiny.
That was a shared European vision. The United States was not a thing back then, not even an idea of a thing.
Fast forward to today. That very project—the centuries-long celebration of human logic, empiricism, and optimization—has birthed something peculiar. Its most logical conclusion is sitting in a data center, humming quietly. We built a monument to human reason
Welcome to the great, silent debate at the heart of Team Trump’s rants about the EU. It’s the European Enlightenment vs. US The Algorithm. It’s not a fair fight. One is a back then, history; the other is its living, ticking, hallucinating offspring.The menopausal Ancient Regime against a hormonal and testosterone fuelled but very smart adolescent.
The Original Dream was Logic as Liberation Now it’s the algorithm as profit.
The Enlightenment was, at its heart, a humanist project. It placed Homo sapiens—the “thinking man”—at the center of the universe. Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” wasn’t just philosophy; it was a power move. Knowledge was something to be actively conquered through observation, debate, and experiment. Progress meant building better human institutions: democracies, legal codes, public museums. The goal was to refine the human world for humans.
The tools were gloriously physical: the printing press, the telescope, the encyclopaedia. The battleground was the human mind. It was a top-down revolution, fought with ideas meant to elevate other minds.
Then logic morphed into Automation and humans were reduced to consumers
AI is what you get when you take Enlightenment values—data, logic, efficiency—and remove the human from the driver’s seat. It’s the bottom-up, scaled-to-infinity version.
Kant’s “Dare to know” has been quietly revised to “The model already knows.” Why dare to reason through a complex problem when a chatbot can synthesize ten million arguments in two seconds? We outsourced the daring and kept the output as a subscription service. The grand human project of understanding has been flattened into a user interface.
The Enlightenment sought to democratize knowledge by putting books in the hands of the people. AI seeks to obviate knowledge by putting answers in their mouths. It’s the difference between being given a library card and being given a robot butler who has memorized the library but sometimes, with great confidence, makes things up.
It’s also a great excuse for being intellectually lazy and morally complacent.
The European experiments have been sucked into a black hole. Our enlightened quest to overcome human bias and error has given us machines that replicate and automate our biases at a global scale. We fought to free ourselves from the tyranny of flawed authorities only to build black-box authorities whose flaws we can’t even interrogate.
European society once championed individual genius and creativity. We now have US based systems that can generate a million passable sonnets, legal briefs, or symphonies before a human genius has finished their first coffee. The value of the unique human spark—the very thing Romanticism later celebrated as the fruit of Enlightenment individualism—is now being commoditized by its logical descendant.
The ultimate product of an era that worshipped the human mind is a tool that implies the human mind might be… optional..
Framing this as a “vs.” implies a winner and a loser. But AI isn’t overthrowing the Enlightenment; it’s using its AI program with a brutal, literal efficiency to erase independent thought under the guise of progress.
The real tension isn’t between two eras, but within a single, spiraling story: What happens when humanity’s greatest tool—its rational, problem-solving intellect—succeeds so well that it builds a better one?
The Enlightenment asked: “What can humanity achieve with reason?”
The Algorithm asks, by its very existence: “Was that all just a warm-up act?”
We are living in the death throes of our own greatest idea. The light of reason we worked so hard to ignite now shines so brightly it’s casting our own, suddenly uncertain, silhouette. The project that began by daring us to think for ourselves may well end by asking if we still need to think.
Independent thought will become a lost art. Gone the way of the Dodo.
