The Royal Observatory Greenwich, one of the UK’s oldest scientific institutions, has raised concerns about the growing reliance on artificial intelligence for instant answers, warning that it could erode the human curiosity that drives discovery.

Paddy Rodgers, Director of Royal Museums Greenwich, said the observatory’s long history of research showed the power of human curiosity  and the need to avoid complete dependence on AI.

“A reliance solely on instant answers risks losing the habits of questioning and evaluation that underpin knowledge, expertise and innovation,” Rodgers told BBC News.

Rodgers told the BBC that early astronomers “built a huge amount of data about the heavens which would subsequently be used for things that they had never thought about,”  work that involved doing unnecessary things “a machine would not do.”

He also warned that quick AI responses can distance users from checkable information, unlike earlier tools such as Wikipedia where users could trace back to a fundamental source.

His remarks come amid a major transformation project at the Royal Observatory called First Light, which began in autumn 2025 and is due to be complete by spring 2028, according to Royal Museums Greenwich. Rodgers said the project hopes to “seize on the passion of all the astronomers over the last 350 years, and interpret that passion through science.”

Rodgers acknowledged AI’s role in advancing science, pointing to Sir Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his revolutionary work on protein structure prediction using AI, through a tool called AlphaFold2.

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