The singularity and why you should be very nice to your children

Like most geeks, I have a bit of an interest in 'The Singularity' (insert appropriate theme music). I don't buy Kurzweil's thesis that we boomers will all be uploaded (Eternity plagued by the boomers? Lord help us all); but I can just barely imagine that today's children might live a lot longer than I will. So it was interesting to read this interview with Siggi, a German gentleman of roughly my age:

The World According to Siggi

Talking about immortality, do you think the information tracks we’re leaving online will be resulting in an infinite life of sorts? Or is this accelerating our decay and we’d fare better engraving our thoughts into stone?

Assuming the storage media won’t be failing on us, we’ll have many tracks be around for a long, long time. One day this will make it possible to reconstruct a person up to a certain point. Considering that you can only hope for many of the teen bloggers to never stop blogging. Paradoxically enough that’s the opposite of what you feel when you’re reading them.

I commented recently on Brin's blog that I thought a similar theme could be turned into a neat short science fiction story. Who would want to digitally resurrect a deceased boomer? Well, the boomer's children might be so motivated. So if you want your digital doppelganger to bear any resemblance to yourself, be sure to leave lots of artifacts .... :-).

Also, be nice to your children. To paraphrase an old Pat Benatar song: "Hell is for the parents of vengeful post-singular children". Ok, so that needs work.

PS. I think it's a part of Mormon theology that when one is 'saved', one can retroactively 'save' all of one's ancestors. Maybe that could be worked into the story ...