Oddly Depressing

Time magazine waxes on about "The Singularity" in the credulous way that it is good at:

For Kurzweil, it's not so much about staying healthy as long as possible; it's about staying alive until the Singularity. It's an attempted handoff. Once hyper-intelligent artificial intelligences arise, armed with advanced nanotechnology, they'll really be able to wrestle with the vastly complex, systemic problems associated with aging in humans. Alternatively, by then we'll be able to transfer our minds to sturdier vessels such as computers and robots. He and many other Singularitarians take seriously the proposition that many people who are alive today will wind up being functionally immortal.

This somehow strikes me as a very depressing idea. I'm not sure I'm Classical enough to insist that previous generations were definitely better than the current one, but I think that functional immortality in this world would make any group of people far worse. Though it would probably be "solved" moderately quickly by the fact that:

a) Most people couldn't afford this kind of existence, whereas traditional biological existence is cheap
b) Imagining for the moment that "functional immortality" either through keeping the body alive via medical technology or via porting were even possible (which I rather doubt) I think most people who tried it would get tired of it after a while and go ahead and die
c) Someone who managed to maintain an interest in keeping up this "functional immortality" would probably become so divorced from real human existence as to be irrelevant -- rather like the minor deities and fay of pagan and Christian folklore.