Air-fueled ion thruster could provide unlimited power for space missions

The European Space Agency (ESA) has successfully tested a prototype ion engine powered by air that could provide propulsion for orbiting satellites almost indefinitely, and could even help power future missions to Mars.

Satellites in orbit traditionally use an onboard propellant — usually xenon — to adjust their orientation and keep their orbit from decaying. Their life is limited by how much propellant they can carry, however. The new “air breathing” design skims molecules from the upper atmosphere and converts them into useable fuel.

In conjunction with the space agency Sitael, the test was conducted in a vacuum chamber in Italy to simulate an altitude of approximately 125 miles. “This project began with a novel design to scoop up air molecules as propellant from the top of Earth’s atmosphere,” said Louis Walpot of the ESA in the announcement.

There are no moving parts on the thruster — all it needs is electricity for the coils and electrodes. Although electricity is plentiful in space, either from solar panels or nuclear decay, it can’t provide thrust.

The electric field is used to compress the air and then accelerate the stream of plasma created. “Providing atmospheric drag compensation without the use of carry-on propellant, this kind of electric propulsion would let satellites orbit at very low altitudes around Earth for very long operational time,” Walpot told Space.com. “Normally their orbit would decay rapidly and they’d reenter the atmosphere.”

A new collector intake created by QuinteScience in Poland gathers air molecules as the engine travels through space at nearly five miles per second, and Sitael designed a dual-stage thruster to charge and accelerate the incoming air. “The collector-plus-thruster design is entirely passive in nature — the air enters the collector due to the spacecraft’s velocity as it orbits around Earth,” Walpot explained. “All it needs is electric power to ionize the compressed air.”

The basic Hall thruster design is not new, but the test results using nitrogen and oxygen proved the collector could work on actual space missions. “When the xenon-based blue colour of the engine plume changed to purple, we knew we’d succeeded,” Walpot said.

Because the atmosphere on Mars is not nearly as dense, a spacecraft would need to reduce its altitude to 75 miles or less to scoop up carbon dioxide, which could also be used as fuel.

“This result means air-breathing electric propulsion is no longer simply a theory but a tangible, working concept, ready to be developed, to serve one day as the basis of a new class of missions,” Walpot added.

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Here’s how you can complete ‘Far Cry 5’ in just a few minutes

In what’s becoming something of a running gag, Ubisoft has included an Easter egg in Far Cry 5 that lets you complete it in about five minutes. The new open-world adventure doesn’t come out for a few days, so watch out for early story spoilers ahead, but PC Gamer has already discovered a secret ending at the very start of the game.

In the game’s intro, you join up with a federal agent and the rural sheriff to visit a shirtless cult leader in a church and take him into custody. As a rookie it falls to you to slap the cuffs on, much to the dismay of the local townsfolk. If you choose instead to just stand there for a few minutes, you eventually turn around and depart. Roll credits!

Ubisoft has pulled this trick before. In Far Cry 4, when you first visit villain Pagan Min, he steps out and you’re prompted to escape the villa and begin your epic adventure. If you choose to just sit quietly instead, Min returns after a few minutes and you get to lay your mother’s ashes to rest — the reason for your visit in the first place.

The newest Far Cry game takes place in the wilds of Montana, and this time you’re up against cult leader Joseph Seed and his band of murderous followers. We got our hands on an early version of the game last year and were impressed with the huge arsenal and the other characters you can recruit to help you in your quest. The game also allows co-op play with a friend through the entire campaign.

After the premise of the game was first revealed, creative director Dan Hay sat down with Digital Trends and revealed the reasons why the new entry in the series is set on American soil. “In this game, your own backyard is more interesting and more compelling and more scary than something you would pay to get on a plane to go to,” he said.

There was a bit of controversy about the game’s storyline, mostly on the lesser-traveled corners of the internet, calling it anti-American. The change.org petition reads like a parody, but it’s undoubtedly representative of some people’s reactions.

There’s also a free full-fledged map editor included, where players can create maps and missions that even include various assets from other Ubisoft games

We’ll have lots more about the game when it’s released into the wild next week. Far Cry 5 releases for PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 on Tuesday, March 27.

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There is ‘good’ data collection and then there’s Facebook, and you need to know the difference

Claiming “you are the product” is the lazy way to talk about companies that collect data.

I’ll let you in on a secret: I hate sharing any of my personal information with any company or person I don’t actually know. OK, for the people who know me that’s not really a secret, but I still need to put that out there because it’s true. I would gladly pay for anything with dollars than data, and that includes Android or Chrome or any of Google’s other services. Not because I think my data would be handled better if I were to exchange money, but because I’d rather not share it at all. Having said that, I know that I have to if I want to be able to use products or services that are worth a damn.

That’s because of the same things that got Facebook into its latest privacy mess. The same data that can be used to allegedly influence voters by lying to them is also used to make life easier through personalization. The difference is not the data itself or how it’s being collected; the difference is the company that is doing it and how honest it is. Unfortunately, that’s hard to measure, and companies that do snatch up our information are all over the map when it comes to transparency and integrity.

I’d rather pay for Android updates with dollars than data, but inevitably the services wouldn’t be nearly as good if I could.

By now I imagine everyone is tired of hearing about Facebook. Well, too bad because I know me and plenty of other people are never going to stop talking about its practices and why it doesn’t deserve your trust. I also won’t bother telling anyone to delete Facebook since the people that actually care about what Facebook did and what it will do again if given a chance already did the thing. No number of hashtags or witty sayings will make a difference, nor will being that guy who says “I told you so!” then remarks on how he deleted Facebook before it was cool. But I’ll always have plenty to say when it comes to companies that use our data to make their millions, what we get in return, and what we need to know about all of it.

I want to start by clearing up some misconceptions about Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. Facebook did not sell your data to anyone, and seeing people who know better claiming it did is disheartening. What Facebook did was worse — it sold access to your data. And because of how Facebook tracks you across its platform and the web itself, it sold access to my data as well even though it doesn’t have any of it. That’s the most important distinction; Facebook tracks and keeps enough data that if you talk to me and someone else talks to me, it can build a profile on me based on the things we talked about. Then it lets someone else have access to that data without your or my approval.

Facebook isn’t the only company that collects huge amounts of data about us each and every day. The elephant in the room here is Google, of course, but every other company that provides a service to you, whether that service is free or paid, also collects data. The amount and type of data can vary; I use Signal for messaging and know it collects some user data, but not nearly as much or as sensitive as the data Google collects. I also use products and services from Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Valve, Ubisoft, and the list goes on and each and every one of them collects user data from me. Some of them are more transparent about what they collect and how than others are, but so far none of them have sunk to the Facebook level of dishonesty about what they have on me and what they plan to do with it.

Did I trade my email address for a free copy of FarCry 5 when it launches in a few days? You bet I did, and now I need to hope Ubisoft is cool and doesn’t abuse my trust.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that most everyone reading this is familiar with Siri, Cortana, and Google Assistant. Each of these smart assistants has a level of personalization that changes what it is capable of, and if you’ve used them all it’s easy to say something like Google Assistant knows more about you and can do more for you than Siri, for example. That’s because Google collects and uses more pertinent data than Apple does. Both companies collect the same types of data, both inform you about what they collect and how they will use it, but Google has to retain and aggregate more of it to offer the personalization that makes you want to use its product because that’s how Google makes money. It makes you want to use a thing, and by using it you provide an even better profile of yourself that it can anonymize and use to target advertisements. Apple makes money by selling you a physical product. Microsoft is somewhere in the middle.

What’s important is to realize that these personalized services are built using the same methods that Cambridge Analytica allegedly used to profile people it thought were low-information voters and influence an election. Collect enough information about a person and it’s almost like you know their likes and dislikes well enough to manipulate them. Maybe you want to convince them to vote a certain way, or maybe you want to show them products they will want to buy. At some basic level, there’s little or no difference and data collection itself isn’t the bad guy. It can be, but it can also be the good guy who reminds you that your anniversary is coming up or that you have a doctor appointment next Tuesday at 1:50.

If Google were to follow Facebook’s playbook the results would be far worse than potentially influencing an election. Let’s hope it never happens.

The “bad guy” can only be the company that uses this data in ways that aren’t clear to its users. The really bad guy is the company that not only mistreats its customers but has means for third parties to jump in and molest our data for a fee. Facebook has thrown red flags when it comes to privacy for years by doing things like changing privacy settings when features are added, or playing loose with developer agreements and breaking rules about how they send app updates out. ‘Dishonest’ is really the only word I can find that describes my opinion of the company as a whole.

In contrast, Google is parked atop a mountain of the very same types of sensitive data from over one billion people. So is Apple. So is Microsoft. The difference is that they aren’t doing things with it that expose it to others or something even worse. Each company has had its share of mishaps, and those mishaps correlate against the amount of data they collect; Apple has had privacy issues, Microsoft has had a few more, and Google has had even more. But so far they haven’t been found to be doing anything malicious and privacy blunders are the result of bad decisions or bugs in the giant machines.

Does Google sell your data?

And that’s the distinction that’s not being made when we read someone saying we are a product and not a customer when we use free services in exchange for giving up our precious data. That’s lazy and people need to stop saying it and start talking about it instead.

Stay safe, everyone, and #DeleteYourInternet

Seoul will turn off workers’ PCs to curb excessive overtime

South Korea has a serious problem with overtime. A typical government worker puts in 1,000 more hours per year than their equivalents in other countries, which could easily affect their long-term health. Seoul’s Metropolitan Government may have a simple technology-based solution, however: force workers’ computers to shut down. It’s launching an initiative that turns off all PCs by a set hour, giving staff little choice but to head outside.

The effort will start on March 30th, when PCs will start shutting down at 8PM. In the second and fourth weeks of April, PCs will shut off at 7:30PM on Fridays. And by May, PCs will turn off at 7PM every Friday. This is a blanket ban, too. There may be exemptions in special cases (and 67.1 percent of workers have asked for one), but there’s a good chance that most workers won’t get it.

This certainly isn’t the first time we’ve seen organizations put a hard limit on work. France gave workers the legal power to ignore work email without fear of repercussions, while a Japanese company even invented a drone that nags employees until they accept that it’s time to stop. However, Seoul’s PC-based approach is particularly blunt — it’s ensuring that even the most obsessive workers finish in time to do something besides go to sleep.

Via: Gizmodo

Source: BBC

Google app hints at custom Routines in Assistant

You can already use Routines in Google Assistant, but you’ve so far had to tweak “ready-made” examples to fit your needs instead of creating your own from whole cloth. That might not be a problem before long — 9to5Google has discovered code in the latest Google app beta hinting at upcoming support for custom Routines. You can tell Assistant both what command to use and what actions to perform when you say the magic words. You could have a “movie night” command that dimmed the lights and warmed your home, for instance.

The beta also refers to pinned sports scores that would appear while you use other apps, letting you keep tabs on that all-important match without having to ask Assistant or find the relevant info card. Other code helps explain how gestures for Pixel Buds will work: you could tell the double-tap command to do something besides check notifications, or triple-tap for manual control. You could even turn off the Pixel Buds just by removing the right-side earpiece.

As with any hidden code in pre-release software, there’s no certainty that the features are imminent, or even that they’re guaranteed to arrive. Updates sometimes linger in beta for months or get cut entirely at the last minute. All these updates are very practical, though, making them more likely a matter of “when” than “if.”

Source: 9to5Google

Facebook scooped up Android call and text metadata (with consent)

If you’ve been using the Facebook app on Android for quite some time, it’s possible that the social network has records of every call and text you made these past years — though it’s not as bad as it sounds. It was software developer Dylan McKay who first discovered that Facebook scraped his call logs and text metadata when he downloaded a copy of his account data under General in Settings. Ars Technica was able to confirm his report, finding similar info in his account after downloading the same document. With the Cambridge Analytica fiasco going on, the last thing Facebook needs is another issue related to data privacy. It doesn’t seem like the company collected users’ call and text logs on purpose, though: its app only got access to those info due to Android’s permission structure, and then only with your consent.

Downloaded my facebook data as a ZIP file

Somehow it has my entire call history with my partner’s mum pic.twitter.com/CIRUguf4vD

— Dylan McKay (@dylanmckaynz) March 21, 2018

According to Ars, if you gave Facebook permission to read your contacts before Android Jelly Bean dropped, you also inadvertently gave it access to your calls and texts by default. The app was able to collect data until Google deprecated Android API version 4.0 in October 2017. So, yes, the issue has been fixed — and it never affected iOS users — it’s just unclear if you can purge call and text logs from your account. Since you can’t turn back time and prevent yourself from welcoming Facebook into your phone’s contacts section, best you can do is delete your contacts’ data and hope for the best.

In a response to the discovery, Facebook stressed that this call and text history logging was an “opt-in” feature for Facebook Lite or Messenger, and that you had to expressly agree to it. It added that turning it off in the relevant app’s settings would delete that info. Facebook never sells this data, the company said, and it never collects the actual content of your conversations. Really, this isn’t so much a shocking revelation as a reminder that many people have explicitly granted permission to Facebook and its apps without realizing what data they were offering up in the process.

Source: Ars Technica, Dylan McKay (Twitter), Facebook Newsroom

Smashwords wants to Findaway to make it easier to create audiobooks

Over the past few years, it has became easier than ever to self-publish a novel thanks to services such as Amazon, CreateSpace, and Smashwords. That lower barrier of entry has not extended to audiobooks, however, where production can often be prohibitively expensive for new authors. Smashwords and audiobook producer and distributor Findaway Voices have teamed up to make it easier and more affordable for new authors to break into the growing audiobook market.

In an announcement, Smashwords CEO Mark Coker said the partnership between Smashwords and Findaway Voices would give authors greater control over the pricing and distribution of their audiobooks. Corker says this will make it more affordable for authors of smaller works to produce these publications.

Once authors have filled out a short questionnaire and provided Findaway Voices with their ebook, they’ll be given a curated list of voice actors to chose from. This list will include audio samples and rates, which tend to run between $150 to $400 per finished hour of work. Additionally, authors can request these voice actors to audition by having them submit sample readings of the author’s book.

Once production of their audiobook is finished, the author retains full rights to distribution of the work. They will also have access to all 20 of Findaway Voices’ distribution channels including Audible, iTunes, Scribd, and others. Authors will also be able to sell their book on any other platform of their choice.

Interested authors will be happy to know that they can get started right away simply by going to the audiobook section of Smashword’s author platform.

Coker believes that this partnership will provide a boon to readers and authors alike. Audiobook sales is the fastest growing segment of the publishing industry, thanks in large part to the rise of services like Audible. Coker notes, however, that Audible’s credit system, which give subscribers one free audiobook a month, has unintentionally had a negative impact on authors of smaller works. Coker believes that the credit system incentivizes readers to seek out larger and more expensive works as a way to ensure they get the most out of their $15 a month.

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Virtual reality roller coaster ‘The Great Lego Race’ opens in Florida

It should come as no surprise that amusement parks have embraced virtual reality technology in a big way, adding another layer of “thrill” to their rides. But The Great Lego Race Coaster, which just opened at Legoland Florida, may be the most ambitious and amazing VR roller coaster yet.

Previously known as Project X, the roller coaster is unchanged, but the VR veneer drops riders into a wacky and colorful race reminiscent of a Mario Kart game. “The Great Lego Race was inspired by the way kids play with Lego toys at home,” Candy Holland of Legoland said to Attractions Magazine. “It’s a unique Lego adventure that lets kids enter an epic, imaginary would made entirely from Lego bricks, featuring a host of different themes and fun Lego characters all mixed up together.”

“What we did is painstakingly map out every inch of this roller coaster,” Keith Carr of Legoland told the Orlando Sentinel. “What you feel and what you see are actually in sync with each other. That’s what makes the virtual reality work. What we wanted to do was take and enhance the drops and take and enhance the turns, and that’s what the VR allows us to do.”

The VR headsets — adorned with googly Lego minifig eyes — are optional and you can ride in “reality mode” if you want, but why would you do that?

The ride begins with an intro video showcasing a wizard, surfer, pirate, pharaoh, and other racers and characters you’ll encounter. You’ll also get instructions on attaching the VR headset, which is cleaned before each use. The coaster is catered to children under 12, so don’t expect any inversions or high-speed helix turns.

Once strapped into your four-person go-kart, the race twists and turns through a variety of detailed Lego landscaped, smashing through walls and taking unexpected detours. The action takes place all around you in a full 360-degree view, so you can look behind you and see the destruction you’ve caused.

For an at-home preview of The Great Lego Race, as well as other cool theme parks around the world, you can download MackMedia’s Coastiality mobile app for Android, iOS, and Oculus.

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Construction companies are welcoming their new robot workers

Automation is changing the face of nearly every industry in the world, but the construction industry may lead the way for robots.

The Associated Press reports on the intersection between tech and construction, with new startups unleashing a wave of innovation in robots, drones, and software. A big part of the reason is that construction companies can’t find workers. But robots don’t mind getting dirty.

“To get qualified people to handle a loader or a haul truck or even run a plant, they’re hard to find right now,” mining plant manager Mike Moy told the AP. “Nobody wants to get their hands dirty anymore. They want a nice, clean job in an office.”

Employees at a masonry company in Colorado recently learned how to operate a bricklaying robot named SAM, short for Semi-Automated Mason. SAM can lay 3,000 bricks in an eight-hour shift using a conveyer belt and robotic arm. Rather than fearing job loss, however, the workers welcome the opportunity to automate some of their more mundane tasks.

“There are lots of things that SAM isn’t capable of doing that you need skilled bricklayers to do,” said Brian Kennedy of the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers. “We support anything that supports the masonry industry. We don’t stand in the way of technology.”

Built Robotics is a startup from Noah Ready-Campbell, a former Google engineer and son of a construction worker, who’s designing self-operating excavators, backhoes, and other construction vehicles. “The idea behind Built Robotics is to use automation technology make construction safer, faster, and cheaper,” he said. “The robots basically do the 80 percent of the work, which is more repetitive, more dangerous, more monotonous. And then the operator does the more skilled work, where you really need a lot of finesse and experience.”

Other machines are being used to analyze and report on the work itself. Doxel is a roving robot that’s used to monitor whether construction projects are proceeding according to schedule, keeping projects within budget. By tracking and analyzing activity at an often-chaotic job site, Doxel can track progress and identify potential problems before they arise.

Drones are another tool developers can use to simplify time-intensive tasks. For example, a drone from a company named Kespry uses 3-D mapping to survey and quantify huge piles of rock and sand across a huge site measuring dozens of acres in less than two hours. A contractor with a truck-mounted laser would take a full day for the same task.

“Not only is it safer and faster, but you get more data, as much as ten to a hundred times more data,” said Kespry CEO George Mathew. “This becomes a complete game changer for a lot of the industrial work that’s being accomplished today.”

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Meet the British whiz kid who fights for justice with a robo-lawyer sidekick

Joshua Browder/Facebook

There’s a line in Shakespeare’s Henry VI in which one character offers his take on how to improve life for everyone in England. “The first thing we do,” he says, “let’s kill all the lawyers.” Jump forward 400 years and 21-year-old British computer whiz kid Joshua Browder doesn’t want to kill all the lawyers, but his robot lawyer may just help delete them.

A few years ago, then-18 year old Browder created an A.I. chatbot called DoNotPay, designed to help anyone who needed it to appeal parking tickets for free. In his own words, it was a “side project just to impress a few friends.” But it became something more than that. After receiving a series of parking tickets himself, Browder was shocked by the lack of available free resources to help him. Even worse, he discovered an underclass of lawyer who would help complete the necessary forms, but wanted half the cost of the ticket in order to do so. Shortly thereafter, a new project was born.

In fall of 2015, Browder created DoNotPay, an A.I. chatbot that helps people appeal parking tickets for free.

His hacked-together robot lawyer works by guiding users through a series of questions, like whether or not parking signs were clearly visible when they parked, as part of the appeals process. When DoNotPay launched online, it went viral almost immediately. Within a short space of time, it had helped successfully appeal $4 million worth of tickets. Today, Browder pegs that figure at around $12 million.

“I’m just doing this from my dorm room,” Browder, now a computer science major at Stanford University, told Digital Trends. “It’s not like it’s something that’s got a big corporation behind it. I just love coding, and I’ve coded something I’m lucky enough is now being used by hundreds of thousands of people.”

Know your rights

The problem, he says, is that most people have no idea about their rights. That’s a big issue because most of us turn out to be very compliant: we’ll complain about a parking ticket to our friends or partner, but we’ll ultimately pay it because… well, surely the people issuing the fines know what they’re doing!

Since launching DoNotPay, Browder has expanded the service, working with a small team of volunteer lawyers to do so. The DoNotPay chatbot can now help people get access to government housing, dispute an airline charge, resolve problems with landlords, and hundreds of other use-cases. Recently, Browder launched an update which helps people in the U.S. get the absolute cheapest airfare. To do this, it continually searches for lower-priced tickets, even after you’ve made a purchase, and then finds a legal loophole to help you cancel the old one and rebook at the lower price. The difference in cost gets refunded straight to your bank account.

“It’s really exciting to give access to justice for people,” he continued. “In the U.S., and I think a similar statistic is true in the U.K., over 80 percent of those who need lawyers can’t actually afford it. By making this service free I can help people to access the justice that they need.”

Using modern technology it’s possible to scale “those same great principles to help make the world a slightly better place.”

Browder comes from a dauntingly high-achieving family. His father, Bill Browder, is an American-born British financier, previously CEO and co-founder of the largest foreign portfolio investment firm in Russia, before being banned from the country for allegedly exposing corruption. His grandfather, Felix Browder, was an American mathematician known for his work in nonlinear functional analysis, who at one time served as president of the American Mathematical Society.

However, it’s his great grandfather that Browder cites as perhaps his biggest source of inspiration. Earl Russell Browder was an American political activist who was leader of the Communist Party USA during the 1930s and first half of the 1940s. “In the 1940s, he actually ran for President of the United States on the communist ticket,” Browder said. “He was like the Bernie Sanders of his day. There were big problems with exploitation and worker rights. He used to do these huge campaigns to help people fight for their rights, mailing out thousands of letters to people.”

Using modern technology, Browder says that he believes it’s possible to scale “those same great principles to help make the world a slightly better place.”

The ‘Mark Zuckerberg house’

Which brings us to DoNotPay, circa 2018. After going it alone for a few years, Browder has now accepted some venture funding. Last summer, he moved out to Silicon Valley for a couple months and rented the “Mark Zuckerberg house,” a five-bedroom home in Palo Alto, depicted in the movie The Social Network as the nerdy frat house that served as Facebook’s first unofficial HQ.

Is there any conflict between the noble mission of helping people achieve justice, and a desire to latch onto the legend of a fraternity-style home that once saw a young Mark Zuckerberg ride a zipline into the swimming pool?

“Silicon Valley is getting worse and worse in the eyes of the public. However, there’s one thing that I think is really good, and that should be transferred to the rest of the world, and that’s that lots of people who start [businesses] don’t do it just to make money,” Browder said. “I can’t read Mark Zuckerberg’s mind, but don’t believe that he started Facebook to make money. He did it because it’s a cool product that helped lots of people.”

“I’m not against lawyers in general; just the ones who exploit people by charging huge amounts for copying and pasting documents.”

Does he worry about the effect that DoNotPay might have on lawyers? After all, while lawyers aren’t always painted as the world’s most sympathetic bunch, they’re just as much at risk of automation as the rest of us. In the book Failing Law Schools, law professor Brian Tamanha points to U.S. government statistics suggesting that, through 2018, there will only be 25,000 new openings available for young lawyers — despite the fact that law schools will produce around 45,000 graduates during that same timeframe.

This might one day turn out to be the “good old days.” It is quite possible that one day law firms will hand many jobs over to A.I. systems, and retain only a few high-earning human lawyers at the top of the pile.

“I’m not against lawyers in general; just the ones who exploit people by charging huge amounts of money for copying and pasting documents,” Browder said. “I don’t think my software will be arguing in the high court any time soon, but one day my dream is to give everyone representing themselves in court a personal robot lawyer that can advise them on what to say to help them with their issues. In the long run, hopefully everything a consumer would ever need a lawyer for can be made free for them. That’ll be true access to justice.”

The automation of law

Not everyone is convinced that A.I. robots such as this will necessarily disrupt the legal profession in a profound way. In a Quartz article, the legal journalist and scholar Ephrat Livni disputes the description of DoNotPay as a “robot lawyer,” pointing out the complexity of what a real lawyer does. Livni isn’t wrong. Applying the law to a case isn’t just about knowing how to call up the right rule at the right time.

The judicial process, for instance, is less about mechanical objectivity than it is about a high level of intersubjective agreement. Lawyers have to be creative in their arguments. It’s also hard to imagine large companies ever laying off their slickly suited legal team in favor of recruiting the A.I. law firm of Siri, Watson, & Alexa (or whatever such a firm might be called.)

But if advances in legal A.I.s continue to develop at the rate of other artificial intelligence applications, our understanding of what is “standardized” and “bespoke” legal advice will almost certainly shift. In 2004, serious academics thought A.I. would never be able to drive a car. A few years ago, the board game Go was considered a no-no for machine intelligence. Both of those are now demonstrably incorrect. What job that currently requires a human lawyer is the equivalent of either of those?

Even if DoNotPay only continues to carry out lower level legal work, though, Browder is convinced that his service is making a difference.

“I get about 100 emails a day,” he said. “People sometimes assume that because I create these technologies, I can personally help them with random legal issues. That can be exciting when it gives me new ideas for products. But on the other hand I’ve heard some really sad stories. Just in terms of parking tickets, I’ve heard from people who are homeless, who live in their car, and just keep getting new tickets every day. I’ve also heard from people whose banks made one minor mistake on their credit report, which ruins their life. This makes me realize how terrible the world can be — and how important it is to try and do something to help.”