Journal of Artificial Intelligence and AI Ethics (ISSN: 3142-8223)
Open Access | DOI: 10.64978/JAIAE
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The Enlightenment Reborn

The Honorable Xiąże John McClellan Marshall*, Dr. Roger F. Malina

Received : September 19, 2026 | Published : October 09, 2026

Citation: Marshall, J.M. and Malina, R.F. (2026) ‘The Enlightenment Reborn’, Journal of Artificial Intelligence and AI Ethics, 1(4), pp.1–4. doi: 10.64978/jaiae.2026.1009008

Copyright: © 2026 The Author(s). Published by SCIVOLVE.

License: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0) , which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format, provided appropriate credit is given to the original author(s) and the source, a link to the Creative Commons licence is provided, and any changes made are indicated.

Abstract

In this article the authors recognize that the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence and virtual reality has created an epistemic crisis. This requires a renewal of the Enlightenment commitment to empirical inquiry, critical reason and human responsibility. An historicalconceptual analysis, supported by illustrative cases from law and medicine, demonstrates how technological efficiency is increasingly confused with intelligence, judgment and wisdom. In common parlance, the terms such as “artificial intelligence” and “virtual reality” obscure the dependence of these technologies on human-designed mathematical systems, selected data, embedded biases, and potentially vulnerable infrastructures. The central problem, however, lies not solely in the machine but in the man–machine interface, i.e. users may abdicate judgment without adequately examining the origins, limitations or accuracy, and possible hallucination, of the information produced. While computational systems can search extensive bodies of data with remarkable speed, they lack the embodied human experience, empathy, moral intuition, and practical wisdom required for reliable consequential decisions. Only a human can make the final decisions, and it is in the retention of the human factor in this man-machine relationship that the Enlightenment concept of the application of human intellect to the analytical process comes to the fore. The beneficial future of artificial intelligence will therefore depend upon preserving human critical agency and treating machines as instruments of inquiry rather than substitutes for judgment.

Keywords: wisdom, cyberefficiency, 18th Century Enlightenment, moral intuition

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