Josh Harlan’s When Will AI Exceed Human Performance is a body of work that explores the social implications of a future where AI technology is prioritized over human performance. 

The series presents an excerpt from a data visualization published in The Economist. The graph cites a study of the same name, jointly published by Oxford and Yale Universities in May 2018. 

The authors of the report surveyed 352 researchers who published at the 2015 NIPS and ICML conferences, the premier conferences for peer-reviewed research in machine learning. The report seeks to weigh the consequences of machine learning on policy-making, technology, ethics, and social behavior. It further explores the predictive immediacy of AI technology exceeding human performance relative to the demographics of the sample of experts surveyed. The study cites, for instance, that experts in Asia predicted this phenomena to occur much sooner than experts in North America.

The color schematic adopted by Harlan for this series is further meaningful in its reference to Brice Marden’s historic Red, Blue, Yellow I painting from 1974. In referencing Marden’s work, Harlan introduces his work into a lineage of abstract painters exploring the very definition of abstraction.