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In 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft in her work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman posed the question, "In what does man's pre-eminence over the brute creation consist?" She answers, "In reason and virtue by which mankind can attain a degree of knowledge." Today, no one would argue that man and woman are not intellectually equal, or that humans have a superior intellectual capacity over the brute creation, but what would they say about humankind versus the machine? We have always felt ourselves superior to animals by our ability to reason -- "to form conclusions, judgments, or inferences from facts or premises"(Random House Dictionary). Philosophers have argued for centuries about what defines reason, now on the dawn of the 21st century this age old question must be revisited.

Since the ENIAC, the first mainframe, hummed to life in 1946, the chasm between humankind and machine has appeared to dwindle. Computers have insinuated themselves into the lives of millions of people, taking......

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Approximate Pages: 3 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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