Kant went out for his walk at half past three in the afternoon with such exactness that the neighbors of Königsberg set their clocks by his passing. Two and a half centuries later, it is the clock that sets me. The device on my wrist knows when I slept badly, suggests that I breathe. The century that promised to free man from his tutors ended up renting him one for twenty dollars a month, and we still thank it for the kindness.

The Enlightenment, said the old professor, was man’s exit from the nonage for which he himself was to blame, the courage to use his own understanding without direction from another. “Sapere aude”. Dare to know. The proposal was simple and scandalous, and those who took it seriously paid dearly. Condorcet, who wrote about the infinite perfectibility of the human spirit while hiding from the guillotine, died in a cell of the same revolution he had hailed as the dawn of reason. The project of emancipating man always carried that awkward detail, the habit of devouring its first believers.

Well, the project matured and changed its address. The heirs of the eighteenth century live in California now and offer as convenience what Kant demanded as courage. And the offer works so well that it spares us the exercise.

This week I asked the machine I carry in my pocket who had written a certain sentence about automatons as heirs of the Enlightenment. It confessed it did not know for sure. It listed hypotheses, marked each one with its corresponding degree of........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)