There's bipartisan agreement in Washington that the US government should do more to support development of artificial intelligence technology. The Trump administration redirected research funding towards AI programs; President Biden's science advisor Eric Lander said of AI last month that "America's economic prosperity hinges on foundational investments in our technological leadership." At the same time, parts of the US government are working to place limits on algorithms to prevent discrimination, injustice, or waste. The White House, lawmakers from both parties, and federal agencies including the Department of Defense and the National Institute for Standards and Technology are all working on bills or projects to constrain potential downsides of AI. Biden's Office of Science and Technology Policy is working on addressing the risks of discrimination caused by algorithms.

The library has chosen three computer science and digital humanities experts to investigate how branches of artificial intelligence such as neural networks and computer vision can help humans sift through some of its millions of digitized items. The Morning Download delivers daily insights and news on business technology from the CIO Journal team. "We are all inspired by the technology we see in our everyday lives," such as photo apps that use facial recognition to group together pictures of the same friend or family member, said Kate Zwaard, director of digital strategy at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. "People are really interested in applying that technology to the [library's] collections." The library's current search technology relies on the indexing of text and metadata records that allows items to be recognized by a computer. But there are millions of items that cannot be found through search, in part because the task of categorizing each item is impossible for humans to do alone, Ms. Zwaard said.