A new artificial-intelligence chatbot has successfully overturned more than 160,000 parking tickets in New York and London by essentially acting as a lawyer — all free of cost.
The robot lawyer, also known as the “DoNotPay bot,” is the first robot attorney in the world and was created by London-born, Stanford University student Joshua Browder.
The purpose is to contest parking tickets in the most convenient and thorough way possible. The chatbot messing system will ask a user a number of basic questions to decipher if an appeal is possible. If the original criteria is satisfied, the chatbot will then advise the driver on the next steps in the appeals process.
Browder says “DoNotPay” has taken on 250,000 cases and won 160,000 of them in just 21 months since the service became available. The 64 percent rate of success has put roughly $4 million of parking tickets back in the people’s pockets, according to The Guardian.
The technology only took Browder three months to create, but it did not come without some resistance. “It’s really difficult as every city has different laws,” Browder told The Telegraph. “The US parking authorities are less likely to dismiss tickets. In the UK they’re a lot more fair.”
But for the technology combatting law enforcement’s potential overreach, comes a counteractive mechanism. In Swansea, Wales, an enforcement van colloquially known as “robo-warden” has policed the streets and issued more than 5,000 tickets. Mounted cameras on the vehicle scans if nearby cars are violating parking ordinances, according to South Wales Evening Post.
In an apparent sign of respect, tech expert Christopher Soghoian tweeted out Browder’s reasoning for coming up with this potentially revolutionary technology.
Creator of free bot that has appealed & won 160,000 parking tickets on why he did it. https://t.co/9NgVknupuf pic.twitter.com/e5IKVQ4Sq8
— Christopher Soghoian (@csoghoian) June 28, 2016
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