2026-05-18 13:05:53
The rise of artificial intelligence systems that instantly answer questions and solve problems could reduce human intelligence and curiosity, the Royal Observatory Greenwich has warned.
Paddy Rodgers, director of the Royal Museums Greenwich group, said society risked losing key habits of questioning and independent thinking if people became overly dependent on AI-generated answers.
Rodgers said: “A reliance solely on instant answers risks losing the habits of questioning and evaluation that underpin knowledge, expertise and innovation.”
The warning comes as the Observatory undergoes a major transformation project called First Light, which aims to celebrate more than 350 years of scientific discovery and astronomical research.
Rodgers said many of the Observatory’s historic breakthroughs would never have happened without human curiosity, experimentation and the pursuit of unexpected results.
According to Rodgers, early astronomers gathered huge amounts of data that later became useful for discoveries they could never have predicted at the time.
The concerns arrive as AI tools become increasingly integrated into everyday life, education and scientific research.
In 2024, Demis Hassabis won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AI-assisted research into protein structures through DeepMind’s AlphaFold2 system.
Meanwhile, Reid Hoffman has described AI as a “transformation” of “cognitive excellence”, encouraging people to use chatbots to challenge ideas and test assumptions.
However, academics have increasingly warned about “cognitive outsourcing”, where people rely on AI systems instead of engaging their own memory, reasoning and learning abilities.
Anuschka Schmitt said modern conversational AI systems had “dramatically reduced the barrier for humans to forego cognitive effort and engagement”.
She added that studies showed competencies, memory and learning could be “quickly but negatively impacted” through overreliance on AI.
The debate comes as AI-generated summaries increasingly replace traditional web search results across platforms including Google, TikTok and X.
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