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. BBC reported.
"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.
These discoveries, he said, would not have been possible without technological innovation.
But he added they also would not have occurred without asking and pursuing answers to questions ourselves, and 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," he said.
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."
