What Happened to Empathy?

San Francisco, I realized during a visit to the city this spring, has a people problem. Not a homeless-people problem, or a tech-people problem, but a lack-of-people problem. As I walked from my hotel in SoMa to the Embarcadero on a sunny afternoon, the emptiness of the streets felt nearly apocalyptic. Passing other humans—a fundamental circumstance of urban life elsewhere—here was so rare, it felt oddly menacing. I did pass some people who looked unwell, or dirty from living on the streets, but that’s not why I felt the way I did. The volume and density of humanity are what make cities feel safe. The pleasure and pain of a city is that we are never alone, even when we desperately want to be. That wasn’t the case in San Francisco.

So I was bewildered when of the city’s experiment with driverless taxicabs. During that visit, I stepped over two people who appeared to be high on fentanyl, stepped past too many boarded-up storefronts