Robot Named to Board of Venture Capital Firm

A venture capital firm in Hong Kong has named a robot to its board of directors, and the robot “will be treated ‘equal’ to the other board members.”

The announcement came in a press release from Aging Analytics UK, a biotech company. The appointment may very well be a publicity stunt to promote the introduction of their new artificial intelligence tool called VITAL (Validating Investment Tool for Advancing Life Sciences.)

The new tool has been licensed to a venture capital firm in Hong Kong called Deep Knowledge Ventures. It is on the board of this company that the robot will sit.

Dmitry Kaminskiy, Deep Knowledge’s senior partner, is excited about his new robot overlord board member. “The prospect for utilizing this approach in portfolio management is very attractive,” he said in the release. “We were attracted to a software tool that could in large part automate due diligence and use historical data-sets to uncover trends that are not immediately obvious to humans that are surveying top-line data.”

Kaminsky answered questions about the board appointment to Beta Beat:

Will VITAL actually be incorporated into the board of director meetings?

On the meetings investors will firstly discuss the analytical reviews made by VITAL. All the decisions on investing will be made strictly after VITAL provides it’s data. We say that VITAL has been acknowledged as an equal member of the board of directors, because it’s opinion (actually, the analysis) will be considered as probably the most important one. So basically yes, it will be incorporated into meetings.

Will it be a bunch of humans plus one computer sitting around a table?

No, don’t take it literally.

And will people actually take its advice as seriously as the advice from other board members?

Humans are emotional and subjective. They can make mistakes, but unlike the machines they can make brilliant intuitive decisions. Machines like VITAL use only logic. The intuition of the human investors together with machine’s logic with give a perfect collaborative team. The risk of the mistake will be minimized.