Future Imperfect #30: When robots litigate
Welcome to Future Imperfect! This week I’ve been following chatbot lawyers, Tesla’s big crash, prospects for a digital dark age, and the never-ending fight over GMOs. Oh, and a little anarchy in the UK.
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When robots litigate
So it looks like bots might have more of a purpose than poorly constructed media bots. Case in point: everyone’s new favorite chatbot lawyer!
An artificial-intelligence lawyer chatbot has successfully contested 160,000 parking tickets across London and New York for free, showing that chatbots can actually be useful. Dubbed as “the world’s first robot lawyer” by its 19-year-old creator, London-born second-year Stanford University student Joshua Browder, DoNotPay helps users contest parking tickets in an easy to use chat-like interface.
The 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. 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% appealing over $4m of parking tickets.
Why does this matter? Finally, someone put together a chatbot that is actually useful (for a look at some … less than useful chatbots, check out Gabriel Muller’s article for Digital Trends Index). I can imagine similar use cases across a number of industries including healthcare (diagnosing symptoms in a less “WebMD always tells me I have cancer” vibe), real estate (guiding you through the buying/selling process), and IT support (have you turned it off and on again?).
Hitting an autonomous snag
Well it seems that it was bound to happen sooner or later—a person died while using Tesla’s autopilot capabilities. The Washington Post’s Brian Fung has a great analysis on why this shouldn’t be treated as a failure of autonomous technology at large.
The deadly accident, which took the life of 40-year-old Joshua David Brown of Ohio and is the subject of a federal safety investigation that Tesla disclosed Thursday, is bound to raise a lot of questions about vehicle automation and the future of car travel…It may be tempting to describe this as a driverless car crash, but don’t give in. There’s a big difference between assisted driving technologies and full automation, and what we have here is the former.
We should be careful not to conflate Tesla’s autopilot with full self-driving capability. Tesla’s autopilot is markedly different from Google’s self-driving car, which uses not only radar and cameras but also laser beams and sophisticated map models to pinpoint your exact location relative to the world around you.
Regulators have developed a classification system to help distinguish how advanced a car is on the automation scale. Level 0 means your car is totally dumb, while level 4 automation (the highest level) means the car is entirely robotic. Google’s self-driving car would be an example of level 4 automation. Tesla’s autopilot falls somewhere lower on the scale, a level 2 or level 3, because it helps make driving a little easier and, as we saw in the video above, can take over “safety-critical functions” from the human.
Why does this matter? You’re going to hear calls for significantly more regulation in this space in the coming weeks. Oversight is fine, but overreaction is another thing entirely. This is reportedly the first such crash for Tesla—hardly a rash of autonomy-related failures. Autonomous driving is coming, based on testing so far it is at least on par with human driving in terms of safety, and it’s only going to get better from here as technology improves. The big concern might not even be driving ability at all, it might be securing vehicles from hacking attempts.
Preventing a digital dark age
Does the Internet need an archive? The New York Times’ Jenna Wortham envisions what could go into such a repository, and the challenges archivists would face.
Building an archive has always required asking a couple of simple but thorny questions: What will we save and how? Whose stories are the most important and why? In theory, the internet already functions as a kind of archive: Any document, video or photo can in principle remain there indefinitely, available to be viewed by anyone with a connection. But in reality, things disappear constantly. Search engines like Google continually trawl for pages to organize and index for retrieval, but they can’t catch everything. And as the web evolves, it becomes harder to preserve…
In March, I participated in a talk at the Museum of Modern Art about racial and gender disparity among Wikipedia contributors and how it influences the texture of the site. (Roughly 80 percent are men, and minorities are underrepresented.) Print out everything about the “Star Wars” universe, and you’ll have a heavy tome, but many notable abolitionists and female scientists are practically nonexistent. Considering that Wikipedia is the sixth-most-visited site in the world and increasingly treated like the encyclopedia of record, this problem seems worth considering.
Why does this matter? Vint Cerf, a Vice President at Google, among others has previously warned about the potential for a digital dark age, where the vast majority of the information we create is lost as hardware and software formats become obsolete. Maintaining an archive of some form becomes the only way for us to document our history for future generations.
In defense of GMOs
100 Nobel laureates wrote an open letter to Greenpeace asking for the organization to cease blocking the distribution of genetically modified foods from reaching populations in need. April Fulton at National Geographic calls out what we would lose in a world without GMOs, as Greenpeace and others (including the Non-GMO Project) get their way.
Does this mean that GMOs are perfect? No. There are indications that some GMO crops are creating expensive problems with herbicide-resistant weeds, according to a recent National Academy of Sciences study (see Scientists Say GMO Foods Are Safe, Public Skepticism Remains), and the public perception that GMOs are uniformly bad is a major hurdle to selling them. And then there’s the whole labeling debate.
Greenpeace calls GMOs “genetic pollution.” But if GMOs are to be completely out of the picture, it might mean there are no vegetables enriched with cancer-fighting chemicals, drought-resistant corn, allergen-free peanuts, and bananas that deliver vaccines.
Why does this matter? Non-GMO advocates can’t have it both ways. Not all GMOs are bad for humans, and not all “natural” foods are good for us either (see Chipotle’s fight against food contamination). The better, rational approach is to dig a level deeper to which forms of GMOs are worth investing in. It’s hard for me to believe that an organization arguing for a total ban is paying attention to the research being done in the industry.
Burning up
Today’s sci-fi short story is a look into an unusual family with particularly unusual traits—the aptly named The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family by Usman Tanveer Malik.
In Wasif Khan’s yard was a tall mulberry tree with saw-like leaves. On her way to school she touched them; they were spiny and jagged. She hadn’t eaten mulberries before. She picked a basketful, nipped her wrist with her teeth, and let her blood roast a few. She watched them curl and smoke from the heat of her genes, inhaled the sweet steam of their juice as they turned into mystical symbols.
Mama would have been proud.
She ate them with salt and pepper, and was offended when Wasif Khan wouldn’t touch the remaining.
He said they gave him reflux.
GIF of the Week: Pong … in space
Euro 2016 Update: #ICELANDSMITES
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