T. Coraghessan Boyle on Man and Machines

Your story in this week's issue, "Asleep at the Wheel," draws on a real incident in which the San Francisco S.P.C.A. hired a robot security guard to deter homeless people from camping out on its property. What was it about that incident that caught your attention and inspired a story? We talk about depersonalization--of the migrants at the border, for instance, or of the hordes threatening us from their "shithole countries," as our chief executive so eloquently expressed it--but here it is, the ultimate nonperson, a machine, keeping order in our streets. Truly, we are living in one of the bad sci-fi flicks of the nineteen-seventies. In San Francisco, the S.P.C.A. lost the battle and the robot was fired.