AI on the Board of Directors? A Hong Kong Company Made It Happen

It seems that every year, we find new practical applications for AI. This could be helping doctors diagnose patients, developing self-driving cars, and helping farmers increase their crop yield. However, in recent times there have been some very interesting new roles for AI and it brings up ethical and legal questions. Going forward, we will definitely have to reexamine the role AI is playing in our society today as well as its expanded presence in the future. Let’s take a look at some interesting examples of AI taking on new roles and responsibilities.

AI on the Board of Directors?

Since AI can process and calculate a lot more information than humans, it would make sense to incorporate this technology into the decision making process. However, one venture capital firm in Hong Kong is taking this concept to the extreme. Deep Knowledge Ventures (DKV) made history when it appointed the first AI robot to the board of directors. Even though Vital, the AI robot does not have an official position or title on the board, the managing partner of DKV, Dmitry Kaminsky, said that the company would not make any positive investment decisions without getting approval from Vital. The reason this company things so highly of Vital is because they credit this robot with saving the company from bankruptcy.

DKV awards funding to researchers working on developing new medication to battle some of the diseases and illnesses that currently do not have a cure. However, the failure rate in the biotech sector is very high, with 96% of drugs failing in medical trials. This makes it increasingly difficult to spot projects that have a good chance of being successful. Therefore, Vital helped DKV avoid some risky investments which would have brought about the collapse of the company, which is why they are consulting with Vital on all future investments. Mindy Support is providing researchers with the necessary data annotation work to make such AI-powered robots a reality and help companies grow.

In order to create a robot like Vital, a lot of data annotation is required to train the machine learning algorithms. It is an indispensable part of data preprocessing in supervised learning. Thanks to the annotated data, the AI is able to identify recurring patterns in the training data and after some time, it can recognize similar patterns in new data. Since AI has achieved such success in the business world, we can expect its role to be increased in the near future.

AI Granted Citizenship

In 2017, Saudi Arabia made a lot of headlines when they offered citizenship to an AI robot, called Sophia. At a business event in Riyadh, Sophia physically went on stage where she told a packed room of researchers and AI enthusiasts about what an honor it is to be granted Saudi citizenship and even conversed with panel discussion moderator, Andrew Ross Sorkin. When asked about whether humans should be concerned about the rise of robots and the increasing role of AI in our lives, Sophia said that there is no reason to be concerned. She said, “You’ve been reading too much Elon Musk and watching too many Hollywood movies”.

All jokes aside, this brings up many questions, especially since the European Parliament is debating whether or not to declare robots “electronic persons”. If robots are awarded citizenship, then they are also given certain rights and freedoms that come with it which must be respected. However, there is currently no bill of rights for robots which poses questions about her status. For example, does this mean that Sophia has the same rights as a human Saudi citizen?  As AI becomes more advanced and robots are capable of functioning the same way as humans in society, this problem will definitely have to be addressed.

Since Sophia is capable of conversing with humans, a lot of data annotation is required to train the Natural Language Processing in the robot that allows the robot to comprehend what people are saying. This includes semantic annotation which includes identifying various concepts in the text files used to train the system and to create references from which the system will learn from. This form of annotation is also performed to create some of the popular chatbots and personal assistants we use today.

Mindy Support is Facilitating the Development of Next-Generation AI

Mindy Support is taking the burden of data annotation off the shoulders of researchers allowing them to focus their attention on developing their product. We are one of the largest BPO providers in Eastern Europe with more than 2,000 employees in 6 offices all over Ukraine. Our rigorous QA processes ensure that all of the work is done correctly at the first time of asking and this also allows us to scale your team without sacrificing the quality.

Posted by Il’ya Dudkin