To Understand AI, Think Like a Dragonfly
The article discusses the multifaceted nature of AI and the importance of adopting a broader perspective to understand its implications. It introduces the concept of 'dragonfly thinking,' which encourages viewing AI from various angles to capture its complexities. The author maps out nine narratives about AI, highlighting the diverse opinions on its impact on work, power, and information.
- ▪AI is a hyperobject that cannot be fully understood from a single viewpoint.
- ▪The author proposes 'dragonfly thinking' to grasp the complexities of AI.
- ▪Nine prevailing narratives about AI reveal differing perspectives on its impact.
2 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 7 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
- ▪ To Understand AI, Think Like A Dragonfly — RealClear Markets
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 3,312 of its stories.
Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | NOEMA |
| Canonical URL | https://www.noemamag.com/to-understand-ai-think-like-a-dragonfly/ |
| Publication time | Sat, 23 May 2026 15:08:26 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-23T15:22:27.478Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-23T15:22:27.478Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | SLhWnRSPBkOL · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
To Understand AI, Think Like A Dragonfly As AI rapidly reshapes our world, narrow, single-view thinking risks mistaking part of the picture for the whole. Satwika Kresna for Noema Magazine EssayTechnology & the Human By Anthea Roberts May 21, 2026 Credits Anthea Roberts is a professor of international law and global governance as well as the founder of the startup Dragonfly Thinking. She is known for her work on contested global debates and the use of AI to augment human thinking in complex decision-making. Depending on your point of view, AI may look like a liberating tool, an existential threat, an environmental disaster — or something else entirely. This is not due to personal bias; it is because the phenomenon itself has more faces than any one position can see.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at NOEMA.
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