I have a serious problem with the logical connection between these two statements: They’re not doing what technology is intended to do: Solve problems. and

I have a serious problem with the logical connection between these two statements: They’re not doing what technology is intended to do: Solve problems. and: But by and large, these apps do not exist to solve problems. They exist and thrive because they feed our individual vanity. In the first statement, she is saying that these technologies do not do what technology should do. In the second, she says that their intention is not to do what technology should do. I think that the latter is more the point of the article, but the former is the more interesting question. Great scientific discoveries can be produced by accident. If a process regularly produces good things, we should be hesitant to malign it just because it was not the intention of those producing the initial technologies. The classic example is that penicillin was discovered by accident, but there are more. One of the motivations for the initial development of Unix was the desire to play games. Computers themselves started out as tools to crack codes and calculate ballistic trajectories. Technology naturally grows beyond its initial limits, and given how fresh these technologies are, we should be hesitant to characterize them as being without meaningful value for society, which I saw as the author's intent with this article.