EDITOR’S NOTE: Also featuring special guest, Joni Evans, CEO of wowOwow.

JONI: Let’s talk about the way kids grow up today versus the way we grew up.

MARY: I was an only child and I didn’t have cousins and our world was local; it was a neighborhood world. Today, so many of the young people – and that means from really young, up through the 20s and 30s, have friendships with people on screen. These are friendships that they enjoy and seem to get great satisfaction from. But they’re with people that they have never actually touched or met physically. They have relationships through screens. And they live such a screen life. They emulate the people they see on the screen. They’re stimulated and directed, and admire people on screen. And they’re amused and entertained by people on screen. And the screens can be very big ones or they can be tiny ones, iPods. They can be almost anything. But their lives are very screen driven.

LIZ: I remember when I was a child, being bored quite often. And now nobody is bored. Nobody lets themselves be bored. My father would say, “Come on you children, want to go with me?” And we’d say, “Where are you going, Daddy?” And he’d say, “Gotta take a chance and get in the car.” He’d be backing the car out and we’re afraid not to go because it was when we didn’t go that he took the others to the park and rented ponies for them and wonderful things happened. And it seemed to me, the days I went, he would always go to see Mr. So-and-so about cotton futures and I’d be sitting in the car with nothing. So I remember enduring that. But I don’t think kids endure anything anymore. They have instant gratification, instant games.

MARY: So much of life today is a game. There are games that the children play. There are games that men and women play on consoles, there are alternative-reality games. There are games on television, which everybody watches. There are games that have in them the prospect of 15 minutes of fame. And all those games and all those screens – are they changing people?

LIZ: Is it something missing from their lives?

MARY: It may not be. It may be wonderful. It may be an aspect of evolution.

LIZ: The women I’ve observed with children or grandchildren – they spend all their time trying to get those kids to go out and play sports and to get them to read. And they are tremendously distracted by all this mechanical entertainment.

LESLEY: But don’t you think that this business about getting kids to read is not new? Ever since television has come into our lives … My point on the reading is that it goes back a couple of generations. And I just wonder about these kids today, if their brains aren’t wired completely differently from ours. We grew up reading and learning through our eyes. And these kids do learn differently. They learn visually and aurally. They learn from two different ways at the same time. I bet if somebody did some brain mapping, they would see that they absorb information differently. They’ve evolved.

MARY: They get different ideas, too. I mean, they know there’s a world. They don’t think that their neighborhood is the world. And they also know, by watching television or by watching the computer screen, that if they really want to know something about a rosebud, they can go find out about the rosebud. I mean, they know that the world is very complex, that it’s very big and it’s got a lot going on and there’s a tremendous amount to think about and to do something about or to care about. We weren’t programmed to think that way because there was nothing stimulating us to do that. It’s probably part of evolution.

LESLEY: It is. I agree. But they, of course, aren’t having the human contact that we did. And we don’t know how that’s going to affect the next generation.

JONI: Ray Kurzweil.

MARY: Ray Kurzweil. If you read Ray’s book, eventually you will be whatever you want to be, and not necessarily human. But you will be fully alive.

LESLEY: You know, many years ago I did a program when I was on Face the Nation. It was science fiction that could come true – that really could come true. And the idea was that in a couple of hundred years we would be computers, with a little tiny dot of our DNA. We’d be completely mechanical. We wouldn’t have arms. We wouldn’t have legs. We might not even need hearts.

MARY: Now you’ve got nanotechnology coming – in Ray Kurzweil’s book, The Singularity Is Near.

LESLEY: You know, if they can come up with a better hand than our hand, right? Then one day our hands will atrophy. You could see it. You could see that we would go there. We won’t have to exercise.

JONI: We won’t have to die.

LESLEY: We won’t have to die, right. But what will we be?

LIZ: Last week, in The New York Times, there was a story about a future world where people are part robot and part human and there’s a woman who is trying to have herself reconfigured into a 12-year-old because her husband is a pedophile. It’s incredible.

LESLEY: Oh, my word.