Some aren’t looking to defeat the robots but to join them. They want no confrontation.

Members of the Grinder subculture aren’t waiting for science and technology to perfect and normalize the melding of humans and machines but are instead taking matters into their own hands, one magnetized fingertip at a time. From “Who Wants to Be a Cyborg?” Alex Mayyasi’s Priceonomics post which begins with an anecdote about early adopter Rich Lee:

“If you ask Lee why he did this, as we did, he’ll reply, ‘I realized that if I want to be a cyborg, I have to do it myself.’

Lee recognizes that this ‘is not a goal that everyone has now.’ But he is not alone in his ambition. Lee associates with a loose-knit community of ‘grinders,’ people interested in augmenting their human bodies with implanted technology. Other enthusiasts have implanted magnets in their fingertips so that they can feel electromagnetic fields, placed a device that sends biomedical data to the Internet via bluetooth under the skin of their forearm, and built hardware that allows them to experience color as sound.

For decades, technologists and science-fiction writers have speculated about a future in which humans meld with machines. New technologies like Google Glass, meanwhile, lead to comparisons with The Terminator and speculation that it is the first step down the path to an augmented reality.

The grinder community, however, is not waiting for the future to arrive; they’re building it by tinkering with their own bodies. And their first, do-it-yourself steps toward becoming cyborgs show that humans can already modify or augment their experience to a surprising degree.”