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Creator of Chatbot that Beat 160K Parking Fines Now Tackling Homelessness (theguardian.com)

Posted by msmash on from the doing-what's-right dept.

An anonymous reader writes: The chatbot lawyer that overturned hundreds and thousands of parking tickets is now tackling another problem: homelessness. London-born Stanford student Joshua Browder created DoNotPay initially to help people appeal against fines for unpaid parking tickets. Dubbed "the world's first robot lawyer", Browder later programmed it to deal with a wider range of legal issues, such as claiming for delayed flights and trains and payment protection insurance (PPI). Now, Browder, 19, wants his chatbot to provide free legal aid to people facing homelessness. He said: "I never could have imagined a parking ticket bot would appeal so much to people. Then I realised: this issue is bigger than a few parking tickets." In an interview with the Washington Post, the 19-year-old said he decided to expand the bot's capabilities after DoNotPay began receiving messages about evictions and repossessions. In February this year tenant evictions reached the highest on record.

2 of 93 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How is this a good thing? by Tx · · Score: 4, Informative

    I don't see anything in the article about the bot fighting evictions of non-paying tenants. It's talking about helping people who are already homeless to successfully apply for emergency council housing, and helping them get in touch with housing charities.

    --
    Oh no... it's the future.
  2. Re:How is this a good thing? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Right, I feel really sorry for the landlord who has enough money to buy two houses, taking food out of his mouth is *terrible* compared to taking food out of the mouth of the person who can't even afford the basics of staying in some shelter somewhere.

    1) Many landlords don't have "enough" money, they take out loans (and have to pay them back using rental income) to buy rental properties.

    2) Why should the landlord be responsible for providing rent-free housing for their tenants? Some of whom are perfectly capable of paying and are just being jerks.

    Personally I'd never buy rental property because most people are jerks and I don't want to deal with them.