AI provokes more competing narratives than any technology in history — not because people disagree about the facts, but because they are asking different questions about jobs, power, truth, safety, the environment, and human meaning, all at once. In “AI through Dragonfly Eyes,” Anthea Roberts maps nine narratives about AI — three pairs that look at the same phenomenon from opposite sides, plus three standalone losses the entire gains frame is structurally blind to — then pushes beyond mapping to ask why the disagreements persist. Many turn out to be about scale: both sides empirically grounded, measuring at different levels of analysis. Structural feedback loops explain why some positions are analytically sound but politically losing. And certain losses persist across every plausible future because they are features of AI itself, not of any particular political settlement.

The project also embodies what it studies. Anthea is building multi-agent AI systems — orchestrating dozens of specialised agents to research, map, synthesise, and monitor across all nine narratives simultaneously — because the complexity of the debate now exceeds what any individual mind can hold in view. In the process, she is discovering how agentic AI is transforming the nature of scholarly and analytical work itself: what it means to research when agents can process hundreds of sources in parallel, what it means to write when the machine can draft but cannot think, and what new capabilities emerge when human judgment directs AI systems designed for compound vision rather than single-lens answers.

About the speaker

Anthea Roberts is a Professor at the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet) at the Australian National University and the founder of Dragonfly Thinking, an AI-native strategic intelligence firm. An interdisciplinary researcher and legal scholar, she focuses on new ways of thinking about complex and evolving global fields, including international law, trade and investment, geoeconomics, and complex systems. She directs the ANU Centre for International Governance and Justice and chairs the ANU Working Group on Geoeconomics. She has previously taught at Harvard Law School, Columbia Law School and the London School of Economics, and is the author of Six Faces of Globalization (FT & Fortune Best Book of 2021).

This seminar presentation is a dual-delivery event. 

Light lunch will be provided. 

If you require accessibility accommodations or a visitor Personal Emergency Evacuation Plan please email regnet.communications@anu.edu.au.

Image credit: Image of dragonfly by jonleong64 from pixabay, free to use under the Pixabay Content License.