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"A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. The international women's movements have constructed 'women's experience', as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion." Originally "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.

"Coined by the late transhumanist Alexander Chislenko, the term "fyborg" is a portmanteau of 'functional' and 'cyborg'. It refers to the utilisation of technological tools external to the body, which is supposedly a more popular notion than having surgery to implant the technology. So, while a cyborg would use a mathematical processing chip implanted into his brain, a fyborg would use a calculator or notebook computer to perform any difficult calculations. A cyborg may have an artificial eye overlaying an interface onto the world, but a fyborg may achieve the same thing by wearing high-tech glasses." (Human Enhancement and Biopolitics)

"We cannot see ourselves aright until we see ourselves as nature's very own cyborgs: cognitive hybrids who repeatedly occupy regions of design space radically different from those of our biological forbears. The hard task, of course, is now to transform all this from (mere) impressionistic sketch into a balanced scientific account of the extended mind."

Within two to three decades, our brains will have been "reverse-engineered": nanobots will give us full-immersion virtual reality and direct brain connection with the Internet. Soon after, we will vastly expand our intellect as we merge our biological brains with non-biological intelligence.

"Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, allowing nonbiological intelligence to combine the subtleties of human intelligence with the speed and knowledge sharing ability of machines. The results will include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, downloading the brain and immortal software-based humans -- the next step in evolution." Also found in Are We Spiritual machines? Ray Kurzweil vs the Critics of Strong AI, Gilder and Richards, eds. 1999.

"..We will no longer be Homo sapiens, but Cyber sapiens--a creature part digital and part biological that will have placed more distance between its DNA and the destinies they force upon us than any other animal ... a creature capable of steering our own evolution..."