6:10 a.m.
Wednesday, September 13, 2017 6:14 am

Have you seen this new-car technology that automatically brakes when a car pulls in front of you? You've seen that commercial, of course, where the dad is getting dissed by his teenage daughter on her way to school.

He's takes his eyes off the road to look at her like a spanked poodle, and at that time, these young Turks pull in front of him and he gets his neck snapped as the automatic brakes save the day.

When the car screams to a halt, she gets out of the car to meet up with the Turks as she looks scornfully back at her progenitor.

Now, if that wasn't bad enough, they now have this car with sensors that detects whether a human has run in front of your car - I guess they figured out it would be humanist (bias against humans) to protect cars and not people.

So there's this new commercial that shows a guy blithely driving down the street giving voice commands to his onboard computer and eating a Taco Bell supremo taco breakfast steak and onion burrito. Well, he spills a bit of a fat globule on his pants and looks down at the damage and boom: Some idiot late for work and looking at his I-phone checking his heart rate walks right in front of his car.

Well, the car skids to a stop, saving the youngster hipster 30-something checking his heart rate, but ruining the driver's clothes as taco/burrito makings (such as they are) go flying.

Now the guy walking who didn't get hit because of the technology built into the car looks around and sees that he was almost killed, which in turn spikes his heart rate, prompting a heart rate alarm to go off on his I-phone, which spikes it even more.

He makes a mad dash for the emergency room feeling a mild infarction coming on and makes it just in time for the emergency room docs to say, "hey, fella, sit down, take your phone out of your ass and calm down. You're fine."

Meanwhile, the guy in the car has to go to a Band of Outsiders or Jeremy Scott boutique to get some new clothes for his job at Google.

The great thing is, with all this technology, everybody in this story gets to live another day and the new normal, where another debacle awaits.

But I'm left wondering, if these cars will go into an emergency braking interface for a human, could they not for another smaller mammal - say maybe a squirrel or a chipmunk or field mouse?

And then, we've ruined our clothes for a squirrel?

And then what of the squirrel? Alack, he (or she) has no I-phone measuring his heart rate, will he even know he's at risk for a mild infarction?

Oh, the humanity!