In his 1980 commentary on the story, Dick also suggested that his reasoning for making Bors sympathetic was a result of a form of trust he advanced towards robots, as opposed to androids. "Perhaps", he suggested, "it's because a robot does not try to deceive you as to what it is". One of the themes that runs throughout all of Dick's fiction is the "power of empathy" and he uses it as the "key element defining the authentic human being". For example, when Silvia meets the robot that runs the government, she exclaims "My God, you have no understanding of us. You run all this, and you're incapable of empathy. You're nothing but a mechanical computer."