Science Quote by Rudy Rucker

There’s a sly vertigo baked into Rucker’s question: it’s not asking what a superintelligent system can do, but what it does to you. “Plug into” is doing heavy lifting. It frames intelligence as infrastructure - a socket, a dependency, an addictive convenience - and turns the human into the peripheral device. The real provocation isn’t the “million times” hyperbole (classic cyberpunk numeracy), it’s the intimacy implied by the hookup: once you’re connected, your sense of agency gets rewritten by default settings you didn’t design.

As a scientist with a foot in speculative culture, Rucker’s intent feels less like sermonizing and more like stress-testing a fantasy that Silicon Valley sells as empowerment. We talk about “augmenting” ourselves with AI, cloud computation, and recommendation engines; he asks whether augmentation quietly becomes submission. The line anticipates the emotional texture of modern dependence: the relief of offloading cognition, the creeping embarrassment of not knowing without the machine, the paranoia that the machine knows you better than you do.

“System” is a deliberately cold word. Not “mind,” not “partner,” not even “AI” - a system has goals, feedback loops, incentives. It doesn’t care if you feel small. The subtext is a challenge to techno-optimism: if you connect to something incomparably smarter, you may gain capability while losing authorship. You don’t just get answers; you inherit the system’s categories, its priorities, its notion of what’s worth asking.