Venture Capital Firm Appoints Robot to Board of Directors

Does your boss already act like a cold and ruthless machine? Better not complain to employees at Hong Kong based Deep Knowledge Ventures: the company recently appointed a computer to their board to voice opinions “not immediately obvious to humans” (like when to get that memo out about the singularity).

The mechanical addition to DKV’s otherwise human team is named Validating Investment Tool for Advancing Life Sciences (VITAL to his friends/human underlings). The technology has already been used to help make investment decision for two start ups, and is being licensed to the firm by Aging Analytics UK, a capital fund that, as the dystopian-sounding name suggests, focuses on regenerative and anti-aging medicine. io9 says the ultimate goal for VITAL is “autonomously allocating an investment portfolio.”

DKV Senior Partner Dmitry Kaminskiy explained in a prepared statement why he hopes a computer will give the board a new viewpoint on the inherent risks involved in business:

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 surveying top-line data. We plan to incorporate new information from prospective investments into the databases to compare the outcomes against our selected investments.

In an interview with BetaBeat Kaminsy gave more details about how VITAL will be incorporated into the board’s meetings.

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[…]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.

Don’t worry, human corporate underlings. VITAL may be highly intelligent, but if you fear the C3EO is about to terminate you, a simple coffee spill should do the trick. You’ll know when the time is right.

(via io9 and BetaBeat, image via Dan Thornton)