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.

Hmm... maybe because these notable angles are also those of which the associated trigonometric values are round(ish), and so it's about first learning those by heart ? (Like you learn the multiplication table by heart before doing multi-digit multiplications.)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unit_circle_angles_colo...