The peak of all this may be the moment at which the inventor Ray Kurzweil asks, "As Machines become more like People, will People become more like God?" The infectiously enthusiastic Kurzweil is the leading proponent of "Strong A.I.," a brave new world in which a "Non-invasive Surgery-Free Reversible Programmable Distributed Brain Implant" will soon become available. In the keynote essay in "Are We Spiritual Machines?" Kurzweil imagines nanobots--hyper-intelligent miniaturized robots--zipping around our brains and downloading our mental software onto new hard drives which will somehow become re-embodied as us. Immortality looms, if "we are sufficiently careful to make frequent back-ups."

Guests: Rodney Brooks * Author, Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us (Pantheon, 2002) * Chairman and CTO, iRobot Corporation * Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science * Director, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology * Cambridge, Massachusetts Gaby Wood * Staff Feature Writer, London Observer * Author, Edison's Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life (Alfred A. Knopf, 2002) * London, England This week, an automated convenience store opened in Washington. From housekeeping to the battlefield to your neighborhood convenience store, researchers are creating robots to live with us and work for us. In this hour, we'll look at how robots may change our lives. Plus, early attempts to create mechanical life.