Beyond Dragonfly Thinking: AI And The Return Of The Anthropological Question
In a recent essay for Noema Magazine, Anthea Roberts proposed “dragonfly thinking” as a framework for understanding artificial intelligence. Like the compound eye of the dragonfly, she argues, AI must be approached through multiple simultaneous lenses: economic, geopolitical, environmental, informational, humanistic an...
This article presents a sophisticated critique of AI not as a technological disruption but as a civilizational mirror, exposing deep anthropological incoherence. The strongest version of its argument—steelman—is that AI, by recursively processing humanity's symbolic inheritance, reveals the unresolved tensions in modern thought: the collapse of shared metaphysical assumptions, the fragmentation of truth into interpretation, and the psychological burden of self-construction. The piece avoids emot...