Agentic AI and Complex Decision-Making: How to Think Like a Dragonfly

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. Roberts 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.

Co-sponsored by the HLS Center on the Legal Profession, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, and the Library Innovation Lab. Light snacks will be served. This event is open to HUID holders only.

About Anthea Roberts

Anthea Roberts, a Professor at the School of Regulation and Global Governance at the Australian National University (ANU), is an interdisciplinary researcher and legal scholar who focuses on new ways of thinking about complex and evolving global fields. Her research areas include international law, trade and investment, the effect of geopolitical change on global governance, and understanding and navigating complex systems. Anthea is the Director of the ANU Centre for International Governance and Justice and chairs the ANU Working Group on Geoeconomics. She formerly taught at the London School of Economics, Columbia Law School and Harvard Law School.

In 2019, the League of Scholars named Anthea the world’s leading international law scholar and Australia’s leading law scholar. Her new book Six Faces of Globalization: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why it Matters (2021, co-authored with Nicolas Lamp) with Harvard University Press was listed as one of the Best Books of the Year by the Financial Times and Fortune Magazine. Anthea’s first book Is International Law International? (2017) won numerous prizes, including the American Society of International Law’s Book Prize, and was Oxford University Press’s top-selling law monograph worldwide in 2017-2018. She is currently working on projects relating to complexity, risk and resilience.