I don’t want to brag or anything, but I recently used my first smart toilet.

Smart toilet sounds like a gag gift sold at the mall, something that mocks you in a Brooklyn accent and squirts water in your eye when you raise the little lid.

In fact, smart toilets are marvels of modern engineering. I will not go into their many amazing features here. I encourage you to do your own research.

Smart toilets probably contain millions of times more computing power than was used during the 1969 moon landing.

The Apollo computer was entrusted with landing human beings on another celestial body and the smart toilet computer is entrusted with managing your digestive issues. Which mission is riskier? That is for every man and woman to decide for themselves.

I am not keen on bathroom humor so I will try to be as delicate as possible here. But the modern smart toilet is one of civilization’s more remarkable achievements. In Japan and Europe, smart toilets and bidets have become commonplace. In the United States, we continue to regard them with wariness. I think that many people liken these toilets to extravagances like edible gold leaf, monogrammed bath towels and coffee made from beans digested by a civet cat. It seems, for lack of a better term, hoity toity.

Advances in toilet technology in the United States have tended to focus on efficiency and not so much on the user experience. Americans are more than happy to purchase expensive ergonomic lounge, office and automotive seating, but in the bathroom, they are willing to sit on toilet technology that would not have startled Charlie Chaplin or F. Scott Fitzgerald.

We insisted that music technology advance far beyond the gramophone, yet we’re willing to perch on the same sort of thing Al Capone sat on when he listened to Giuseppe Verdi’s “Aida” on his gramophone.

Of course, some manly pundits have begun issuing rules about which forms of bathroom hygiene are sufficiently masculine. I won’t get into the prudence of this sort of advice except to say, ‘Yech!'”

A person’s masculinity must be pretty fragile if he thinks it can be washed away by a jet of warm water. But what do I know?

What I do know is that I used the aforementioned smart toilet in an Amish-owned coffeehouse. If the Amish, who are famously selective about technology, can appreciate the benefits of a smart toilet, surely the rest of us who walk around carrying little surveilling mainframes in our pockets can stop behaving as though a heated seat represents one of the final stages in the collapse of the republic.

Why am I going on about this?

We live in terrifying times. We have been told by many reputable people that certain inevitable advances in technology will probably wipe (sorry) out the entire human race.

We have been told for years that our global networking and telecommunication technology has shrunk our memories, reduced our attention spans, ruined our sleep and made us depressed and antisocial. We have been told that music streaming technology robs artists of revenue.

The smart toilet, on the other hand, does not track your digital movements, although it may keep abreast of certain other movements, and I regret having begun this sentence. It does not sell your preferences to advertisers, it does not store your browser history, it doesn’t hector you with algorithms and does not show you nude photos of Abraham Lincoln that were fabricated by someone whose motives are best left unexamined.

I guess smart toilets can be hacked, but the dangers posed by this seem relatively mild.

Nobody is predicting that the smart toilet will begin writing literary fiction. What this means is that it will never produce an 800-page novel about three unhappy generations of a rich and emotionally repressed Connecticut family. Every day the smart toilet declines to write this novel is an inestimable gift to civilization.

The smart toilet has no dreams of becoming anything else. No one has programmed it to take your job. No one hopes that one day it will stand up, exit the bathroom and intimidate you into giving it power of attorney.

We spend a lot of time worrying about what technology is doing to us and others now (bad) and what it is going to do to us and others in the future (worse). It is exhausting.

The smart toilet, meanwhile, asks only to make one necessary part of our lives cleaner and more comfortable.

So allow me to be the first to say, Thank you, smart toilet.

That may sound strange, but gratitude toward machines is best expressed while it is still optional.

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