Smartphones are the cigarettes of this generation — expensive, addictive, unhealthy, and heavily pushed by big business.
Thirty years from now, people will look back on this time and wonder what the hell we were thinking. (The answer, of course, is that we weren't, because we were too distracted by our phones to do so.)
You can look at comics from the past and see what people of the time thought the big problem was. In the 80s, walkmans were going to be the death of humanity. In the 1900s, people reading the newspaper instead of talking to random strangers around them was going to be the death of humanity.
The common thread is that people do not like being bored, but some boring things are required each day. We filled the idle time with newspapers, music, and now reading newspapers and listening to music on our phones. It's nothing new. I am not worried.
The underlying problem is that commute times are too long for people to remain attentive to the mind-numbingly boring task of driving. That is what we should focus on fixing.
Thirty years from now, people will look back on this time and wonder what the hell we were thinking. (The answer, of course, is that we weren't, because we were too distracted by our phones to do so.)