system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[TheCulture] could I, as a citizen of The Culture, augment myself to be so intelligent that I'd be rivaling the Minds, or at least intelligent to the point that someone in the government might come to me and propose some important duty/work for me if I wanted to do It?
gpt
So... the thing to understand about the non-trivial Minds is that a significant fraction of their computing capability is not even in this universe, but rather in the infra or ultra bands. They are not just "fast computers", they are *huge* computers. It's never really clarified just exactly how huge, but hinted that it's on the order of ship sized or larger. 

An embodied human, no matter how "augmented" isn't going to rival a Mind. In order to do that, you'd have to actually *become* a Mind, with all that implies.