Instant AI answers can trivialise human intelligence, warns Royal Observatory

"A reliance solely on instant answers risks losing the habits of questioning and evaluation that underpin knowledge, expertise and innovation. Paddy Rodgers, director of the Royal Museums Greenwich group which oversees it, said its rich history of research showed the power of human knowledge and curiosity - and the need to avoid "complete dependence" on AI."

"Rodgers told the BBC that the project hopes to "seize on the passion of all the astronomers over the last 350 years, and interpret that passion through science." He said these discoveries would not have been possible without technological innovation, but they also would not have occurred without asking and pursuing answers ourselves, and encountering unexpected information or results that AI systems might not relay."

"Rodgers said early astronomers "built a huge amount of data about the heavens which would subsequently be used for things that they had never thought about." Their work involved doing unnecessary things "a machine would not do," he told the BBC. "The human beings did, and it ended up being a huge resource that could be used 150 years after they had written it up to help to verify ideas that people were having about what else impacted navigation on Earth.""

"At the same time, AI has been used to aid scientific discoveries. Sir Demis, chief executive of Google's AI company DeepMind, used AI to predict the structures of almost all known proteins and created a tool called AlphaFold2."

Instant-answer AI tools could reduce human intelligence by encouraging reliance instead of active questioning and evaluation. The Royal Observatory Greenwich warns against complete dependence on AI and emphasizes the habits that underpin knowledge, expertise, and innovation. The Observatory’s First Light transformation aims to connect centuries of astronomers’ passion with science, while recognizing that discoveries require both technological innovation and human pursuit of answers. Early astronomers created large datasets about the heavens through work that machines would not do, producing resources later used to verify new ideas about navigation impacts on Earth. AI can also support scientific discovery, including protein structure prediction through AlphaFold2.

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