Instant AI answers can trivialise human intelligence, warns Royal Observatory

Source: BBC Technology

Instant AI answers can trivialise human intelligence, warns Royal Observatory

The rise of AI tools that instantly answer questions and complex problems could make humans less intelligent, the Royal Observatory Greenwich has warned.

The Observatory, one of the UK’s oldest purpose‑built scientific institutions, is known for its contributions to astronomy.

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.

“A reliance solely on instant answers risks losing the habits of questioning and evaluation that underpin knowledge, expertise and innovation,” he said.

Rodgers’ remarks come amid an ongoing transformation of the Royal Observatory in a project called First Light. The project hopes to “seize on the passion of all the astronomers over the last 350 years, and interpret that passion through science,” Rodgers told the BBC.

He noted that past discoveries would not have been possible without technological innovation and without asking and pursuing answers ourselves, encountering unexpected information or results that AI systems might not relay.

According to Rodgers, 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 tasks “a machine would not do.” “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 verify ideas about what else impacted navigation on Earth.”

The Royal Observatory now operates as a museum showcasing research and discoveries of the past.

At the same time, AI has been used to aid scientific discoveries. Sir Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google’s AI company DeepMind, used AI to predict the structures of almost all known proteins with a tool called AlphaFold 2. LinkedIn co‑founder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman described AI as a “transformation” of “cognitive excellence”.

“What’s wrong with my idea? One of the basic things to use AI for is ‘I think X, are you against it?’”

Academics and students have also reported benefits, using the technology to challenge ideas or work through solutions collaboratively. A lecturer at Oxford Brookes University told the BBC that “when used responsibly, AI tools enable students to direct their attention to the more important parts of learning and improve their self‑development,” but warned that simply “outsourcing their thinking” to the tech would highlight its limits.

Limits v promise

Generative AI products that can respond to increasingly complex prompts with text, images, video, or audio continue to be developed at pace. These advances are praised and scrutinised in equal measure, accompanied by warnings about the technology’s limitations and the dangers of over‑reliance.

Rodgers compared AI to earlier online tools such as Wikipedia: “If you were interested in something you could perhaps go back to a fundamental source and check it… and see whether or not you found something that was reliable.” He noted that quick AI responses can omit such information, meaning “you’re getting more and more distanced from relatable or checkable information”.

Nevertheless, generative AI tools that present us with information we do not have to find ourselves are on the rise. AI‑generated overviews have now replaced snippets or lists of links at the top of Google search results, with similar experiments appearing on social platforms like TikTok and X.