Not a great analogy. A better one would be the automobile, IMO. Incredibly freeing and powerful, but pushed by actors for ethically dubious reasons and capable of massive negative societal effects if left unchecked.
I believe a better title would be about “today’s smart phone” assuming we will still have smart phones in the future but they won’t be designed to be addicting anymore.
People take the freedom of moving faster in a car, then get houses that are so much further away from everything that the time savings disappear and they are completely trapped using the car for everything. It's not addiction but it's close in a lot of ways.
Automobiles are not addictive in the medical sense, but consider that, all else being equal, heavy car users will, much faster than others, lose the capacity to walk long distances.
I suspect (I'm a non-obese non-smoker) that far more obese non-smokers get winded by walking such a distance than non-obese smokers, at least until they're fairly old. Also, in walkable cities, I see quite a few smokers but much fewer obese people. If we're talking about hiking hills, it balances out a bit more, although I think the obese would still be at a disadvantage. Losing some of your lung capacity doesn't matter too much until you do intense exercise, but obese people always have to expend extra effort to carry their weight around.
