Stanford Bro Creates A Robot Lawyer To Fight Everyone's Parking Tickets

OregonLive – We’ve all been there: We park our car slightly into the yellow strip on the curb because there’s an oversized SUV in the space behind. We return after lunch to find a citation slapped onto our windshield. So unfair!

A 19-year-old Stanford University student feels our pain — and he’s done something about it.

Joshua Browder has created an artificial intelligence robot called DoNotPay that fights parking tickets for free — and wins. It’s been in use in New York and London since March and has successfully wiped away 160,000 of 250,000 challenged parking citations, according to the website Venture Beat. Time magazine adds that the chatbot has saved people more than $4 million total.

Using DoNotPay is easy, writes Venture Beat: “To challenge a ticket, users log on to donotpay.co.uk and chat to a bot that asks them questions like whether signs were visible at the time a fine was issued or the size of a parking space.” The robot lawyer analyzes the information and comes up with an appeal.

“I think the people getting parking tickets are the most vulnerable in society,” Browder told Venture Beat. “These people aren’t looking to break the law. I think they’re being exploited as a revenue source by the local government.”

The BBC apparently has called Browder the “Robin Hood of the internet.”

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Hey Stanford PD…

Everybody knows that I’m as #TeamNerd as it gets. In fact I think that if I had any drive or initiative whatsoever I would get involved with some sort of youth counseling program for bullied kids and fix them all in one day flat. Yeah it sucks right now, but one day you’ll rule the world. You’ll have more money than God. Everyone will love and worship you for the products you design to make their lives easier. Like Joshua Browder who will never buy a drink in Stanford again (or the world, once this thing spreads) after he got 160,000 parking tickets wiped out and saved people $4 million bucks.

I will say though, Joshua, let me stop you right here.

Browder sees many uses for artificial intelligence that better society, saying “it’s disappointing at the moment that it’s mainly used for commerce transactions by ordering flowers and pizzas.” He’s working on AI projects to provide other, more complex legal services.

Let’s chill with the robots and the AI talk, absolutely nothing wrong with ordering pizza and flowers and using bots to fight your parking tickets. Taking robots too far makes me way too nervous, some people don’t forget.