Raymond Kurzweil

This guy is a genius with probably a little nuttiness in between (probably the good kind of nutiness, in a Ratatoille (the rat) way). He enriches our thoughts about the short term future (less than a thousand years from now), raising very interesting and thought provoking hypothesis. However he has a view of death which is quite peculiar:

"...death is a tragedy. That is our instinctive reaction and that reaction is correct. In my view it is not death that gives life meaning. Life gives life meaning. The creation of knowledge in all its forms (art, music, science, etc.) and relationships gives life meaning. And death is disruptive of that." (source found on wikipedia)

He praises immortality as if it is a good thing. Well, I wonder how much time he takes to get bored of a particular state of mind. But if he his talking about maintaining abilities and memories, well, we've already done it to a large extent: it's called language and it's main result - culture!