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.
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.
So what happens when all 10.5 million Somalians, 22.85 million Syrians, 24.41 million Yemenis, 33.42 millions Iraqis, 37.96 million Sudanese, 6.35 million Eritreans, 77.45 million Iranians, etc apply?
From my position, people should seek refuge in their region and eventually return home. The USA can always send aid in the form of workers, money, logistics, and more.
> Since this certainly won't happen, what's the point of your question?
Demographic explosion in Africa coupled with the consequences of global warming makes it an inevitable event, that should be dealt with right now.
This is not a partisan issue. It's going to destabilize Europe. Massive immigration from third world countries is not the answer to that problem. People in Europe are already on the edge since the latest refugee crisis. What do you think will happen with the next wave? Some people take civil peace for granted a little too much.
Neighborhoods are segregation. Let's all live in a big, happy neighborhood together because segregation is bad.
My point being that you cannot, by definition, eliminate segregation until everyone is made equal in all things. Attempting to do so is fundamentally evil.
The government will do its job and decide what to do with them. I don't think the difficulty of filing an application should be our immigration control method.
It was already a lottery. Not everyone will apply, but the odds of getting in will surely get worse. They were already pretty long. This American Life did a good story on this:
"Ira talks to cyber cafe workers around the world about something that lots of Americans have never heard of, but that people in other countries know all about: a lottery run by the U.S. government where the prize is a visa to come to America. Each year people flock to cyber cafes to enter it, hoping for a lucky break that will change their life."
The diversity visa lottery is an amazing program that provides for around 50k immigrants a year.
The odds of winning a diversity immigration visa is based on national origin of current U.S. residents descended from such countries. Hence, for example, Asia has a small quota since countries with large populations (China, India, Pakistan) are excluded.
Note that the lottery just gives you a chance to apply for a green card. You only get that if you pass the normal stringent vetting process.
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.
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."
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.
> 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.
Sure, but the dev already has experience with the tech behind a chat bot, and may not have the experience needed to make a web app as easily.
Think about all the "obvious" steps involved (text input, message chain display, page/server communications), the extra features FB messenger has (in-message buttons); then the issues with cleanly displaying on multiple screen sizes; and then you start getting into the fiddly bits like page reloading, form submission failures (say, due to internet disconnect)....
...All of that is done for you. You just need to have the meat of the program (the chat) and you're good to go. Makes a lot of sense, actually.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Awesome projects, and I love the civic spirit from which they arise. Any others worth checking out?
Other than chat bots, just making forms and bureaucratic processes more accessible online seems like an arena that still has vast potential for improvement.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
What should happen when there is a conflict between Europeans "bettering themselves" and economic migrants "bettering themselves"? Would you like to see Europeans roll over and ignore their own economic interests? Or do you believe no such conflict is possible?
Does bettering oneself mean the same thing for economic migrants as it does for Europeans, in your mind? I gather from your comment that it means "attaining greater material wealth" for economic migrants. What does it mean for Europeans? Does it mean sharing their material wealth with the less fortunate, at their expense and the expense of their progeny?
Property and wealth are significant issues, but surely not the only things, and possibly not the most significant things. Safety, security and national and ethnic identity are also important to people. If I live in a country and city where my ethnicity and language are the majority, do I want them to become a minority, and do I want to adapt to culture of newcomers?
Just need a bot that submits fake applications to this bot. This will overload the system and reduce the probability of human-generated applications being processed.
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".
It likely gives end users a sense of itemized reward. Rather than showing a vast huge form, or even a progress bar, a chat bot can choose what next to prioritize and present. Not all parts of a form may be applicable, showing what is needed and letting the end user continue at their leisure reduces stress and cognitive overhead. The above is likely why tax companies have been doing better as of late when it comes to completing tax forms.
See - I have the opposite issue, if I'm using a computer I want the information on a webpage or form, if it's not then I want to call and talk to someone - never a machine. If I'm interacting with a system, I want to interact with the system as directly as possible - if I'm interacting with a human, I want to interact with the human as directly as possible. Talking to a machine is a terrible UI in my experience.
Yea I agree, I don't have whatever hangup those people do: what I prefer to use lines up pretty comprehensibly with what's most efficient. I recently took an extended sabbatical and went backpacking and took along a small laptop. Almost universally, people who saw me on it assumed I was working. All of these people were _aware_ that you can do almost anything on a laptop that you can do on a smartphone, but for some reason everyone maps phone to leisure and computers to work. Web seems to fall into a similar category (regardless of the platform); people find it intimidating I guess.
In this case, I'm sure people would prefer answering these questions directly to a person, but that's obviously way higher cost and the point of this system is that you don't have to hire a lawyer. Given that direct human conversation isn't an option, and given the evidently common aversion to normal web interfaces, I'm not particularly surprised that some people might find this valuable.
From a PR perspective, it would seem huge. I doubt he would have had a write up on the guardian or this much exposure on HN if it was a web form instead of a chat bot.
It should give us all some food for thought when we give consideration on how to market our work.
I'll add to what others have replied - there are literally billions of humans who have never filled out a web form, but are comfortable texting. Even tech-savvy people might even prefer doing things that way. Interface style is incredibly important from a user experience perspective and can mean the difference between people using the service and people not using it.
It seems that people are more willing to treat a computer they text with like its a confused person, and work through the troubles. When its a web form though, or an application, they're more likely to act as if the computer is malicious or as if it is mocking them for their ignorance.
Computers are closer to the first mental model than the last---they don't understand the full context of any situation, and when it comes to things like 'understanding' your typical app is programmed to a level less than the average 4 year old.
My guess is they did market research and concluded that this interface was somehow the one their target demographic preferred.
If I had an app to write and learned that customers were most likely to buy it with a UI that involved waving the phone and grunting at it, I'd just shrug and build it that way.
Here is how almost every government form in the UK works - long interactive form, mutiple pages of input. Then you get an error message at the end (or, sometimes you submit the form don't get an error message and then receive an error message in the post after 7/14 days). its easy to see how an interactive form that checks for consistency as it goes would win out!
I bet chatbots are more effective than forms. For a form to work, the user has to look around the page and figure out what to do. The chatbot is a back and forth discussion, but there's one place to look, and one question to answer.
It might not be as efficient for a user who has memorized keystrokes to work through, but more effective for first-time users.
This isn't Breitbart. Your nazi kind aren't welcome here. Edit: Let the Trump boys downvote away but this is precisely the hallmarks of nazism, blaming an entire group of people. I will not sit silently while this happens before my eyes. Go ahead, downvote away.
The repeated misuse of "fascist" and "nazi" is only watering down the meaning of those words, and coming from an independent, is making the far left seem pretty out of touch with the rest of the world.
you can cover your ears and shout 'nazi' all you'd like, but i'm not an extremist in any sense, or even a trump supporter. what i said may be controversial, but it's rooted in well established fact. people can have real concerns about the negative effects of immigration without being an evil boogeyman.
I do agree, and it's totally justified depending on what level one cares about. Is it yourself? Your family? Your community? Your country? Humanity as a whole?
I was more pointing that we have a long history as a country and an economic system of harming the less able to defend themselves economically. To what extent industry helps vs hurts the less well off and who bears responsibility is an open and worthwhile debate - but I'm pushing a bit against the PR that everything that is good for business is good for the people. Is Walmart better for towns if all the local stores close down, and the store profit is shipped back to HQ instead of the community? It can be similar with an oil company contracted to provide an economy for a town in Africa.
This comment breaks the site rules, obviously. Please don't do that regardless of how wrong someone else is. It does no good and makes this place worse for everybody.
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.
How do you not understand this, the entire point of DoNotPay is to fight unfair tickets. If the tickets were valid, he wouldn't be able to fight them. It is designed to help PEOPLE rather than the government.
And top of that, helping refugees is even more of a positive thing. I sense some jealousy...
96 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 192 ms ] thread[0]https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/10/global-refuge...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dadaab
There are millions of Syrian refugees, and a vast majority of them have taken refuge in neighboring countries: Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon.
Demographic explosion in Africa coupled with the consequences of global warming makes it an inevitable event, that should be dealt with right now.
This is not a partisan issue. It's going to destabilize Europe. Massive immigration from third world countries is not the answer to that problem. People in Europe are already on the edge since the latest refugee crisis. What do you think will happen with the next wave? Some people take civil peace for granted a little too much.
My point being that you cannot, by definition, eliminate segregation until everyone is made equal in all things. Attempting to do so is fundamentally evil.
"Ira talks to cyber cafe workers around the world about something that lots of Americans have never heard of, but that people in other countries know all about: a lottery run by the U.S. government where the prize is a visa to come to America. Each year people flock to cyber cafes to enter it, hoping for a lucky break that will change their life."
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/560/...
The odds of winning a diversity immigration visa is based on national origin of current U.S. residents descended from such countries. Hence, for example, Asia has a small quota since countries with large populations (China, India, Pakistan) are excluded.
Note that the lottery just gives you a chance to apply for a green card. You only get that if you pass the normal stringent vetting process.
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.
Think about all the "obvious" steps involved (text input, message chain display, page/server communications), the extra features FB messenger has (in-message buttons); then the issues with cleanly displaying on multiple screen sizes; and then you start getting into the fiddly bits like page reloading, form submission failures (say, due to internet disconnect)....
...All of that is done for you. You just need to have the meat of the program (the chat) and you're good to go. Makes a lot of sense, actually.
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.
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.
The last thing I need is more notifications.
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.
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.
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.
Other than chat bots, just making forms and bureaucratic processes more accessible online seems like an arena that still has vast potential for improvement.
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.)
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.
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.
It does not have to be like that, it is just what you believe.
Does bettering oneself mean the same thing for economic migrants as it does for Europeans, in your mind? I gather from your comment that it means "attaining greater material wealth" for economic migrants. What does it mean for Europeans? Does it mean sharing their material wealth with the less fortunate, at their expense and the expense of their progeny?
at least I don't have to wait for the mod to +v me. we'll have a chatbot for that
[0] https://matrix.org
In this case, I'm sure people would prefer answering these questions directly to a person, but that's obviously way higher cost and the point of this system is that you don't have to hire a lawyer. Given that direct human conversation isn't an option, and given the evidently common aversion to normal web interfaces, I'm not particularly surprised that some people might find this valuable.
From a PR perspective, it would seem huge. I doubt he would have had a write up on the guardian or this much exposure on HN if it was a web form instead of a chat bot.
It should give us all some food for thought when we give consideration on how to market our work.
Computers are closer to the first mental model than the last---they don't understand the full context of any situation, and when it comes to things like 'understanding' your typical app is programmed to a level less than the average 4 year old.
If I had an app to write and learned that customers were most likely to buy it with a UI that involved waving the phone and grunting at it, I'd just shrug and build it that way.
It might not be as efficient for a user who has memorized keystrokes to work through, but more effective for first-time users.
Edit: Are you insinuating that all migrants commit sexual assault, or maybe even that sexual assault is only perpetrated by migrants?
only that there is a disproportionate amount of sexual assault committed by migrants in europe. [0][1][2]
this is a real cost associated with immigration, even if verboten to speak about amongst liberals. women pay the price for their silence.
[0] https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-eez6Ab6u1C0/VmO6u36KY2I/AAAAAAAAI...
[1] https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7lHPdsLuFLU/VmOgQS6thEI/AAAAAAAAI...
[2] http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-McMd_WvVqRk/VmQsLZ_rwUI/AAAAAAAAIL...
I was more pointing that we have a long history as a country and an economic system of harming the less able to defend themselves economically. To what extent industry helps vs hurts the less well off and who bears responsibility is an open and worthwhile debate - but I'm pushing a bit against the PR that everything that is good for business is good for the people. Is Walmart better for towns if all the local stores close down, and the store profit is shipped back to HQ instead of the community? It can be similar with an oil company contracted to provide an economy for a town in Africa.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
I'm not passing judgement on the validity of that theory, merely explaining why the two are so often compared.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13823192 and marked it off-topic.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/11/chatbot-l... [1]
He could quite simply have stopped parking like a cunt.
Shameless self-publicity disguised as public service from an arrogant, self-entitled man.
And top of that, helping refugees is even more of a positive thing. I sense some jealousy...