They are the bane of our modern-day existence: the ubiquitous, day-ruining, crazy-making parking ticket slipped under the windshield wiper like a postcard from hell.
And while, yes, they are often rightfully deserved no matter how much it infuriates us to accept the blame, they also seem increasingly like, well, weapons wielded by cold-hearted parking bureaucrats. Is it just me, or does it seem like unsuspecting car owners have become a new cash cow for our local governments looking to stuff their coffers?
Well, here comes Stanford University student Joshua Browder to the rescue, riding into town on a big white horse called DoNotPay.
That s the name of his startup, an online service featuring essentially a robotic lawyer which to date has successfully contested 160,000 parking tickets in London and New York. Self-described as the world s first robot lawyer by its 19-year-old London-born creator, DoNotPay s program first works out whether an appeal is possible through a series of simple questions, such as were there clearly visible parking signs, and then guides users through the appeals process, says a post in The Guardian:
The results speak for themselves. In the 21 months since the free service was launched in London and now New York, Browder says DoNotPay has taken on 250,000 cases and won 160,000, giving it a success rate of 64% .
I think the people getting parking tickets are the most vulnerable in society. These people aren t looking to break the law. I think they re being exploited as a revenue source by the local government, Browder told Venture Beat.
Browder, who is a self-taught coder and now a hero to 160,000 formerly disgruntled car owners, created the so-called chatbot in his program after having a personally bad experience with the dreaded parking ticket: He somehow managed to receive 30 of the damn things by the age of 18 while living in and around London.
Browder hopes to extend DoNotPay to Seattle this fall, according to the VentureBeat post. (And I m personally begging him to add San Francisco to the list as soon as he possibly can!)
But that s not all: Browder apparently has some more heroic deeds up his sleeve.
VentureBeat reports that he has begun work on a bot to help people with HIV understand their legal rights and one to collect compensation for people whose flights were delayed beyond four hours.
He s also creating a bot that helps refugees apply for asylum, as part of the summer startup accelerator program. It will utilize IBM Watson to translate from Arabic to English.
I feel like there s a gold mine of opportunities because so many services and information could be automated using AI, and bots are a perfect way to do that, and it s disappointing at the moment that it s mainly used for commerce transactions by ordering flowers and pizzas, he said.
Now why can t the guys on HBO s Silicon Valley do something great for the world like that?
Photo from Palo Alto Weekly archives
The post Making the world a better place, one traffic ticket at a time appeared first on SiliconBeat.
