Appreciate the balanced take. An improvement to a technology can be good, or it can be harmful - and beyond a certain point, further amplification can destroy society and the commons which we all benefit from.

Coca leaves are a relatively benign part of daily life in Peru & a few other surrounding countries - they’re on the table in your hotel lobby, ready to be stirred into your tea. But cocaine - same base but made more intense with technology - causes many problems - and don’t even start about crack cocaine.

So when thinking of technology through the lens of what it amplifies we can consider traditional Internet research & writing contrasted vs. using AI - the latter gives instant answers and often an instant first draft.

Great for some; harmful for others. Where that point lies and what factors contribute is different for every individual.

You are right in the sense that addiction and overuse are common concerns regarding new technologies.

Similar concerns existed for the TV and video-games, for example.

The idea of a balance works if you put the problem on a spectrum. "Too much, then it's bad" is a general good advice for anything.

In high school, I started learning geometry. I was puzzled by the angles in the exercises always being 30, 60, 90, 120 (notable angles). I tried a lot to come up with something that could work outside notable angles on my own. I figured that it would be on the next class (it never got there), until I gave up and asked my math teacher. She also didn't knew how to do it by hand. Until this day I don't know.

That's probably due to calculators existing. If they didn't, we would be forced to know. Maybe I would have failed that class and had to work harder, maybe not. I will never know.

There is no such thing as an addiction to calculators. I am not against them. I don't think there are too many calculators in the world. Good, honest tech.

However, I wish doing some math outside notable angles were in my high school curriculum. My teacher was kind and helped curious students. I wish she knew how to do it so she could teach me.

I know that now I could learn that on the internet, or ask an LLM to explain it to me. Notable angles are not the point, right? Just another anecdote.

I chose Gunbound aimbot as an example of something that is not good, not even a little bit. Not because aimbot is addictive (it's the contrary, cheating takes away the reward sensation), but because it unbalanced the game ecosystem. No one could beat the cheaters, who rapidly reached a plateau themselves. If everyone used aimbot, there was no reason to play it, to learn the quirks of each character, to practice, to train your skills.

It's just an anecdote. I tend to stay away from those, but sometimes they're useful.

Regarding focus now, the "skill of the future" and its relation to AI:

We always needed focus. It is as skill of the past too, not tied to a niche tech, not the only human skill, not a point in a spectrum.