Thinks and Minds: Has Software Replaced Man's Ability to Think?

"We are again in the fin de siècle... this time we are discovering much new software... which are not new things but new thinks... and again we are discovering and even weaving new relationships between many thinks and minds..." - Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik's point that softwares are not merely things that have been made, but "thinks" settles in me somewhat of a bothered feeling. Softwares have been made to think. They have been given brains of their own, in a sense, to operate as they please. Softwares are believed to "make" life easier for the human being.

Let's just backtrack a bit. For softwares to make something, it entails man yielding some sort of control to the software to do its job - in this sense, to think. But to think for what? Of what? To think in place of man, to make everything easier for man, to make things more efficient? These are all great benefits of the software, but one has to ask if these benefits result in man becoming more of a machine, and the software becoming man instead. Thinking is something unique to mankind. We have brains that process information more quickly than we expect or believe it to, and yet we yield our brains' abilities to process information to a software - and for what purpose?

Nam June Paik says that "we are weaving new relationships between many thinks and minds". If "thinks" is associated with the software, then do humans only possess minds but do not use them? I cannot help but ask the question of whether softwares have replaced the unique task of the human brain to process information. Has this "weaving of new relationships" turned into a relationship of man's dependency on the software? Are we now unable to think without a software or machine doing the work for us? If we are, then we live in a scarier world than we allow ourselves to believe - not because of physical dangers, but because of the threat to our minds' ability and willingness to be used to think.