
Chatbot that overturned 160k parking fines now helping refugees claim asylum - walterbell
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/06/chatbot-donotpay-refugees-claim-asylum-legal-aid
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roywiggins
I bet you could do a lot of good with an equivalent for eviction proceedings.
Most people being evicted don't have representation.

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etjossem
The author may already be working on this. He "decided to expand the bot’s
capabilities after DoNotPay began receiving messages about evictions and
repossessions." [1] For now the evictions/homelessness feature seems to offer
only assistance in applying for public housing.

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/11/chatbot-l...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/11/chatbot-
lawyer-beat-parking-fines-helping-homeless-do-not-pay) [1]

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jlev
Great to see more chatbots that encourage real world civic action, not just
make it easier to order pizza.

I did similar work with Hello.Vote for voter registration, and there are so
many offline forms that could be improved with a bit of web/messaging UI. Also
see snapfresh.org for a CfA project that helps find places that accept EBT
cards.

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ptaipale
Not sure if this is actual "civic action". At least if this is deployed in
Europe, it sounds to me more like a deliberate action to completely destroy
what remains of the asylum system, which is already struggling both
technically and with its political and popular support, due to the large
number of applicants who are economic migrants rather than actual refugees.

It may be different with U.S. and Canada, though - things are a bit easier
when asylum applicants are not coming over unguarded land borders.

(FWIW, I've assisted an immigrant, an old woman, in composing her complaint to
the national courts and ECHR. The system is rigged against honest applicants
because of the overload caused by more or less frivolous cases. We lost, too,
technically, but she was in too bad shape to be deported so eventually got
permission to stay.)

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taurath
Capital flows completely freely between borders, but people can't. I don't
really blame anyone for being economic migrants - they're just refugees of a
different type.

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ptaipale
Of course I don't blame anyone for being an economic migrant. It's a very
natural thing to do: search for a better life. It's what I would do. Economic
and technical development has progressed in Africa and Asia so that larger
numbers of people than ever are able to consider migration. We see that now on
the Libyan coast.

However, particularly for European governments, it's now becoming visible that
there is a selection to be made: you can have completely open borders, or you
can have a welfare state, but you can't have both.

~~~
taurath
Absolutely true - if given the choice, most anyone would rather live in France
than war torn Somalia. And given altruism doesn't work particularly well in
unstable countries the current system is definitely in a bad state. Borders
will have to be closed, as they marginally are now.

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usrusr
That, or we eventually get a dystopia/libertarian dreamworld where borders are
replaced by walls around private properties, with a near infinite supply of
bodies right at the gates, willing to do almost everything for scraps.

Depressing future scenarios like this make me miss the 1980ies, when popularly
feared terrible futures had clearly good solutions ("don't blow up the
planet") instead of a choice between two evils.

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ycmbntrthrwaway
> with a near infinite supply of bodies right at the gates, willing to do
> almost everything for scraps

It does not have to be like that, it is just what you believe.

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omash
Can someone explain how the first chatbot was any better than an interactive
form?

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wutbrodo
It's something I personally find very bizarre, but I've definitely noticed
that a lot of people have a very strong mental block about doing things on a
computer, or even a browser. These tasks instantly seem 10x more daunting, and
people feel like they can mess it up easily. Chat interfaces that are thin
wrappers over web forms don't provide any actual functional value, but on the
basis of these observations I could understand them helping with people's
feelings of being "overwhelmed by the system".

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r00fus
So it's like a 90's-esque UI wizard?

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elastic_church
before you know it we're going to be using chatrooms with pound signs for each
channel and addressing users with @ symbols again

at least I don't have to wait for the mod to +v me. we'll have a chatbot for
that

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vertex-four
You should check out Matrix[0]. :)

[0] [https://matrix.org](https://matrix.org)

~~~
elastic_church
hm, I wonder if they allow custom URIs, I'd like to change mine Freenode

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fnbr
What worries me about this is the liability- if you mess up someone's asylum
claim, they can die, or suffer extreme harm (e.g. if they're tortured). I'd be
interested in seeing how DoNotPay manages their liability.

~~~
taurath
At what level are they allowed to say something to the effect of "We are
trying out very best to make this as useful and applicable to everyone, and in
order to help as many people as possible we'd like you to agree to not hold us
liable for anything bad that happens. Use us as a resource but we are not
fully authoritative."

~~~
ksdale
I'm not sure how close this is to being the practice of law, but lawyers are
generally not allowed to contract away malpractice liability. As a lawyer, I
feel like it would be beneficial for everyone to allow it in certain cases,
like here, but as with everything, there's the potential for abuse.

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dao-
> The 20-year-old chose Facebook Messenger as a home for the latest
> incarnation of his robot lawyer because of accessibility. “It works with
> almost every device, making it accessible to over a billion people,” he
> said.

That can't be the whole story... A web app could have been at least as
accessible. I guess Facebook offers APIs that make developing this kind of
application easier than looking for other frameworks or starting from scratch.

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andrenotgiant
The idea of Facebook platform being more accessible than the web is scary to
me, but not surprising.

Think about non-tech-savvy users on low-end devices, Facebook is familiar, and
there's no responsiveness or web accessibility issues, it can feel faster
because Facebook can optimize what is getting downloaded.

It is scary when you extend this out a few years, FB and Google continue to
extend the line of what gets consumed on their platform vs what sends people
off to a web page.

Your company's branded app is already dead, soon your company's website will
be dead.

~~~
erikpukinskis
This is partly a consequence of phone manufacturers implementing notification
APIs for native apps first, and on several years later in browsers.

Although somewhat it's just the nature of the beast that these things take a
little while to percolate into each browser.

I don't know how complete support is for web notifications, but eventually it
will be a larger number than Facebook installed base. You can sometimes get
some features early in apps, but the web browsers eventually cover everyone.

~~~
dgellow
Are you using native notifications with websites? I'm really annoyed by the
trend of actual websites asking for access to the notification feature when I
just want to read an article then leave.

The last thing I need is more notifications.

~~~
erikpukinskis
You don't get notifications for messaging? Text, email, etc? And phone calls?
Those are all things a person might want a web app to handle.

I agree the notification requests in browsers are too obtrusive. In an app
store they have the property of only asking when you choose to install. On the
web there is no install so the request for access is not in response to any
action you took, which is annoying.

I think they should make the notification request block the whole app so that
sites only put it up when it's the main thing they want to show.

That aside... the point ia for some apps, like messaging, it is necessary.

I am building an app for selling food, people need to know when to start
prepping an order. notifications are a must.

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dgellow
I agree that there are good cases for notification. It's difficult to find the
correct amount of them and it's too easy to get so much of them so that
everything important is being lost in the noise.

I don't know what's the correct balance is but for my own usage I'm ok using
emails as a notifications spooler and only use native notifications for some
specific usages (mostly chat and email clients). What's sure is that I don't
care about notifications from my browser.

Btw I can only say for myself, we all have different way to use our tools. If
your clients are happy with your notifications, great. I know I would disable
them.

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willyyr
Anyone knows what technology he is using in the background? Is it Facebooks
own BOT-Framework?

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sjroot
Yes, Facebook has a Messenger bot framework.

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emodendroket
I think one of these processes is a lot easier than the other.

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NegatioN
I totally agree. But the common denominator is that both of these battles can
be won by deep knowledge of the beurouchratic process. I believe bots can be
better equipped to deal with this than humans in the long run.

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emodendroket
I can see that, especially with the language barrier (even if you want to
apply for a visa for a foreign spouse, as I did, the paperwork is voluminous
and complex), but if your case is anything other than dead-simple you can't
really duplicate a lawyer's experience dealing with immigration officers (and
judges? I don't know exactly how this process works), knowledge of their
particular individual tendencies, etc.

~~~
ramses0
"A good lawyer knows the law, a great lawyer knows the judge"

