Newly appointed Minister for Industry, Science and Technology, Christian Porter. The federal government has unveiled its first action plan dedicated to establishing Australia as a global leader in developing and adopting responsible artificial intelligence (AI). Industry, Science and Technology Minister Christian Porter said the benefits of AI include protecting the environment, improving health outcomes, promoting smart cities, and boosting the economy. "AI could contribute more than $20 trillion to the global economy by 2030, and the AI Action Plan will help us leverage opportunities for AI to further strengthen the economy and improve the quality of life of all Australians, while ensuring that the development and adoption of AI is guided by appropriate safeguards, privacy and ethical considerations," he said. The government allocated $124.1 million in funding through the May budget to deliver some of the plan's key measures.

Three decades ago, the U.S. government launched the Human Genome Project, a 13-year endeavor to sequence and map all the genes of the human species. Although initially met with skepticism and even opposition, the project has since transformed the field of genetics and is today considered one of the most successful scientific enterprises in history. Now the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), a research organization for the intelligence community modeled after the defense department's famed DARPA, has dedicated $100 million to a similarly ambitious project. The Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks program, or MICrONS, aims to reverse-engineer one cubic millimeter of the brain, study the way it makes computations, and use those findings to better inform algorithms in machine learning and artificial intelligence. IARPA has recruited three teams, led by David Cox, a biologist and computer scientist at Harvard University, Tai Sing Lee, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, and Andreas Tolias, a neuroscientist at the Baylor College of Medicine.