I'd like to open a discussion with your group

Alterion

Hi there,

I am an aspiring author of science fiction stories, and I'd like to open a channel of communication with your group in order to better understand your motivations, thoughts, insights and ideas in regards to the future of grinding and human enhancement.

Me: I'm a 30 year old family man, married with one daughter. I am a technical writer for a software company that has a printing-related software suite, and I love to write.

The "Story": What I envision is an extremely wide possible future and this post is too small to explain it all. However, I have started a blog where I basically do brain dumps, and some of the existing posts may be enough to understand where I'm coming from (especially my last "Timeline" post). But really quickly, I think in our future (perhaps in our timeline) we will start enhancing ourselves with implants that overlay the sense, often called Augmented Reality (think "borg" without the evil collective, or "HUDs" in the real world), followed by a full virtual immersion ("Matrix") and then a transfer of our mind into the computer ("Tron"). All through this, I envision Grinders being always at the cutting edge, a subculture that keeps ahead of the bulk of the population in the use of implants and enhancements.

What I Am Looking For Here: Basically, I'd like to really understand the Grinder culture as it is now, how it evolved, how each of you see yourselves against others, and how you see yourselves in 10, 20, 50 years. I don't want you to write my story, I just want to understand yours and use bits of it inside my own universe. I'll leave this as an open ended question, and I invite you to take a look at the aforementioned blog: http://wp.me/28mVy 

Thanks a lot and don't hesitate to ask questions!

ThomasEgi

in my case, it is pretty much the "we do what we must because we can" thing. since we have almost no base to build upon i dedicated my sparse free time to building basic modules others can use as stepstones. like power supplies, input/output systems etc. the absolute basics others will be able to re-use and extend with their own ideas.
i would guess for most people it is pretty similar to the hacking culture in general. looking at things, understanding them, do something fun/cool/useful with it.

about your timeline, implanting computers (as they are SoC) is pretty much standard even today. If you develop a good electrode array, you can skip your timeline to 2050 all at once. cause once you have the array, you are set, as all the other technology exists for ages. even today we have tiny SoC's that can video-output more than twice the resolution and framerate you need to wire up every single pixel of your optical nerve.

Lucas_Dimoveo

What would you like to know? 

Ian

The grinder movement is pretty recent; the earliest instance of its mentality I can find dates to 2006.  It hadn't even existed as a fairly cohesive movement until 2010 or early 2011; prior to then, it was mostly a bunch of people calling themselves "practical transhumanists."  There are precursors and influences, though; for a history of those, and how grinding exists today, you can go to my blog page on the subject (excuse the blatant self-promotion).  Of course, it goes without saying that my splicing together of all the information I could find on the subject will be infinitely inferior to what historians write in a century or so, so if any of you see something I typed that's blatantly wrong, please let me know.

Also, L has a pretty interesting paper on the subject, as well.

Alterion

Awesome, there seems to be a little bit of material out there from your blog post Ian, so I'll start by just following links and seeing where it will lead me.

Thomas, when you say "Implanting SoC is pretty much standard today", do you have any examples of this? I barely remember seeing a news report on a guy that had an RFID tag implanted and I believe I may have seen one or two examples of that on Hack a Day, but nothing more involved than that. 

ThomasEgi

well. even my granpa has a pacemaker , and these days they pretty much are SoC's. i myself have an rfid implant too, but that is hardly worth to be mentioned, every pet has them these days.

most big chip producers have special chips for medical use, some even recommended for implantation, e.g. http://healthcare.analog.com/en/implantable/segment/health.html
in the end, they all have the same cores with additional modules you can pick from.you probably wont need sata2 on an implant SoC, but instead some more sigmadelta AD's. if you pay for it they even put together custom combinations for you, given you buy in numbers.
given todays chip's as you can get it off the shelf, you can get a full implant with SoC, input and output on a pcb that is about the size of a coin. add another coin sized board for the powersupply.

with custom made wavers you can shrink it down into a chip, just a few milimeters in size + a battery.
it really is just a matter of someone with enough money wanting that very thing. technologically , no problem at all. alternatively, you have to deal with pcb's that are not as small as they could be (carrying the individual chips) , but they still are small enough to implant.

DirectorX

Hi Alterion. I'm 33, married, 2 kids (that I know of). Our group is fairly diverse in political views, professional backgrounds, etc. so I can't speak for everyone. Here is my outlook:

I view grinding as an act of individualism, much like a tattoo. Primarily though, it is an act of ascension. Ascension is not a legal, political, or ethical issue. Ascension is a human right.

Within 5 years (hopefully 1 year) I plan to genetically modify my eyes to accept a wider variety of light (tetrachromacy). If it works, I could actually project an AR setup in a spectrum only I could see. I also plan to have an implanted device that gives me a tactile sonar sense (project bottlenose). I'm still debating the lovetron9000 device, but there is a good chance I will end up doing it within 5 years.

In 10 years I hope to have a device implanted in my brain, like a deep brain stimulator, but built to interface with computers. I will be shedding as much meat as possible when advancements in bionic prosthetic parts begin to surpass existing fleshy models. I'll be weaponized at that point too.

20 years- I hope to have multiple constructs, and experiment with multi-brain memory synching. Brain to brain communication will be a major focus. I'd like to operate multiple bodies at once, and have a networked processing mind like a P2P network, hopefully giving me a form of immortality.

Not sure if that was what you were looking for but I hope it helps.