Slashdot Mirror
Creator of Chatbot that Beat 160K Parking Fines Now Tackling Homelessness (theguardian.com)
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.
A Good Start.
Yeah but there are probably still immoral things that a robot won't do for money so we will still need lawyers.
Or another early sign that the AI revolution may be different from earlier industrial revolutions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Non-paying tenants are the scum of the earth. They are literally taking food out of the mouths of their landlords. The landlord-tenant courts are absurdly pro-tenant as is and delay evictions for 6-12 months as a matter of course as is. Most landlords are not Donald Trumps. They are middle class people who own 1-3 units. A single non-paying tenant can and often does put them on the brink of bankruptcy. This isn't a good thing. People who cant afford their housing need to move and find cheaper housing. They shouldn't get 6-12 months at someone else's expense to do it.
disclaimer: I work to prosecute housing discrimination. im not your attorney though.
after the 1964 civil rights amendment landlords needed new tools to continue the systemic policy of redlined districs in light of things like equal housing policies and anti-discrimination ordinances. They largely found it in Reagans call for a "lawful" society and began instituting policies to reflect "lawfulness" in their rental applications. tenants could now be refused for prior criminal record, poor credit, no credit, lack of a drivers license, bank account, even washing their car outside or having expired tags on their car which would have it towed by a private company at a housing authorities discretion. the idea was to antagonize and outright shun poor people into a market created especially for them.
existing tenements apartments like cabrini green did not have much in the way of requirements for housing other than section 8. Cabrini was a repository for low income black renters and designed to continue a housing segregation policy into the 21st century, but it began to fail after systemic poverty gave rise to sectarian violence and outright block warfare that chewed up a dozen or more cops a year. the solution for Cabrini was to demolish it, renovate the space, and the tenants would then be allowed to return. but it did not work that way. new landlords began instituting the same policies in Cabrini that landlords from the sixties used to prevent access to middle class neighbourhoods for upwardly mobile black families. the result was displacement, and unaccountable gentrification at the expense of a community thats been largely ignored.
to fix the homeless crisis in america means we need to address things like systemic racism, the boom bust cycle of poverty and inequality in american capitalism, and the ability for landed gentry to impose arbitrary restriction on any number of free living conditions to police and enforce what essentially turn into their own mini cities and states. the bot proposed can help with things like overzealous prosecutors and cities that have an unwritten debtors prison policy, but it will do nothing to prevent unscrupulous lenders and collections agencies from hounding the poor and ruining credit scores required for upward mobility.
Good people go to bed earlier.
This isn’t putting any layers out of work. How many do you think want to deal with minor parking and traffic violations? The more interesting cases are personal injury, criminal, IP, and other things where somebody has deep pockets. Heck, most of the time, people don’t involve lawyers in small claims, because it’s not cost-effective.
Who besides the ticket-writers and land lords wouldn’t be chearing for some online legal help? Actually, all the information you’d need to handle these cases was already online; all this does is automate it for you. Not to downplay this, though. Lots of apps have complicated interfaces to do things, but sometimes it’s really nice to have one of those “wizard” dialogues to help you get it started by asking all the right questions.
Civil asset forfeiture, foreclosure fraud, drug offenses, IRS, no fly lists, Our 100 mile "constitution free zone", for almost any non responsive government bureaucracy, the list goes on...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
You forgot the the most important part, within the confines of the law. A robot can only break the law if programmed to do so a a lawyer can break the law as they see fit.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
All people have rights.
Do I have the right to live in a safe and quiet neighborhood? It seems from your argument the answer is no, that it should be illegal to try and keep "sectarian violence and outright block warfare" away.
The US Legal system has a few issues.
1. Most of the law makers are also lawyers. Just as I am a Computer Scientist and I think things can get better if you just fix the process, a trained Lawyer will think to just adding new laws or changing a law will fix all of the problems.
2. Many fines are a source of revenue for the government. While they may give an impassioned speech on how such laws are protecting people. While they are just filling the point of bringing in additional revenue.
3. Laws to help the poor are so complex that only the rich can take advantage of them. Lets put being PC aside for a bit. Often the reason why Poor people are poor is because their actions are not ideal. Such as taking drugs, getting into trouble, or just being lazy. So many of these laws are written for the mythical angle who just seemed to not be able to make it. And when social services are given to people don't seem to deserve it, it gets a lot of heat. So they put a lot of hooks in these laws to prevent abuse that it is nearly impossible for people to take advantage of them.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Only the innocent need a lawyer, the guilty can lie for themselves.
Abraham Lincoln
Look forward to the letters from the law office of Dewey, Cheatem and HAL.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
The people writing tickets - and prosecuting them - do it thousands of time a year. Most people defending against them do it once a year or less. Apps like this just put defendants on a more even footing with prosecutors in terms of knowing the law.
Prosecutors may complain, but if your argument is that you prefer when people don't know the law, you deserve to lose.
Nope, no sig
Just my thought. I mean it is not as if they could do a much worse job or be more expensive.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I wouldn't say that. Just yesterday I was downtown for jury duty and noticed a guy holding up a sign that says "need food", presumably under the premise of getting handouts from jurors routinely passing through.
The thing is, just around the corner is one of those shelters that freely give out all of the food and clothing you could ask for. I guarantee you that this guy knows that, and if you were to offer him a choice of money or food, which do you think he'd opt for?
And the reason for that is he doesn't want food; instead he wants one or more of booze, cigarettes, or to get high. Oh and did I mention he was smoking? If you know how expensive cigarettes are these days, you can see the disconnect.
The best way to help homeless people, in my opinion, is to only give them food and clothing and nothing else, with money absolutely being off limits. Seriously, why would any sane person want to feed the habits that keep them there to begin with?
It is convenient and wards of personal fears to believe that the poor are lazy, have some defect, or behave poorly. But it is a false belief. Mother Teresa spent her life in poverty as did Ghandi, Christ and the Buddha. Many of the best and most worthy people suffer poverty. Ask Mozart! Recently I learned some new ebonics. Getting hemmed was the first term. A hem controls the height of a garment from the ground as well as how far the garment can expand. The trap was the next term. The ghetto is called the trap. Essentially if you are born in the trap you will stay in the trap. Hey, it's only true 95% of the time. The trap is also the area surrounded with cops and in which cops are free to break the law as they know that people who are in the trap can not afford lawyers. So individuals consider themselves as hemmed in the trap. They can only rise off the ground to the regulated degree. They can only expand to the regulated degree. So what happens when people are hemmed in the trap? All too often the city declares the trap a blighted area, pushes the people out, with no place to go and levels the trap. Think of it like it was 150 years ago and the Indian Reservation became an issue for white folks. Boom ! No more reservation, treaties be damned.
If I were the author of this chatbot I'd make a version for landlords to help them with quick evictions and tenants that do not pay, not the other way around.
The best way to help homeless people, in my opinion, is to only give them food and clothing and nothing else
Except they already have access to food from shelters or other places. They do not need (or like you said want) food from you. The best thing you can do is give them nothing, and instead support the agencies whose job it is to help them by providing job and housing placement assistance (among many other things).
uuuuuhhhh.... WOOOSH?
You sound like a Dalek middle manager overseeing the human concentration camps.
I already know that's not true for this particular place because it's a church organization that will give to just anybody who asks.