Creatine and Claude could transform you into a dangerously productive being

By Alex de Bruin

If you aren’t simultaneously taking creatine and using Claude while drinking strong coffee to supercharge your output, you must either have been living under a rock in the greater Karoo (sans Wi-Fi) or be clinically insane. And if you don’t take up these habits immediately after reading this, you are in grave danger of becoming a Luddite. And I don’t mean the wine.

All this puts our lives into relative perspective when you consider that in the 1980s the essential “Cs” were cigarettes and cocaine. And coffee of course — the only common “C” that has spanned the generations. Talk about evolution, Charles Darwin.

I always thought creatine was for meatheads lifting tin in the gym to increase the size of their biceps. But it turns out that increasing amounts of scientific research point towards the positive effects that this chemical supplement has on brain health. Particularly for those in the middle of their lives. And perhaps there are even some physical benefits to the parts of your body other than your brain, as a happy side effect. Provided, of course, that you do lift a bit of tin. And by tin, I mean, compressed recycled plastic. Raw metals are far too expensive these days for pectoral punishment.

I realised how powerful creatine is in a meeting the other day after I had been taking a teaspoon in the morning for two weeks. My brain began to work so fast and to think so creatively in a meeting that I almost had a panic attack. It was as if I had suddenly woken up from a 20-year dream.

As I talked faster, and my heart rate increased, I grew concerned that somehow the latent genetic programming that some are convinced formed part of the Covid-19 vaccination had finally kicked in. Either that or some Pretorian-born devil had managed to insert a high-powered neural link transplant into my brain. Or I had mistakenly taken a double dose of my child’s Ritalin.

Fortunately, my client couldn’t read my thoughts, though he seemed impressed and even surprised at my razor-sharp observations and the way I began to connect a golden thread of seemingly disassociated concepts into an ingenious AI-proof business plan that may provide us both with employment for at least the next six months while the bots figure out original thought.

I have always found the laborious process of modelling my ideas into a spreadsheet or crafting them into PowerPoint intensely dull. Now I have a nice French-sounding chap to put it all into Excel or PowerPoint in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. It is remarkable. He doesn’t even get annoyed when I ask him to make all manner of tweaks or changes. He must be pretending to be French.

I have always found the laborious process of modelling my ideas into a spreadsheet or crafting them into PowerPoint intensely dull. Now I have a nice French-sounding chap to put it all into Excel or PowerPoint in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. It is remarkable.

If I need to read an annual report or a new study, he summarises annual reports in minutes while I chop onions for the curry I am making for dinner. Though you should have a good idea of the answer to your questions because he occasionally takes a wild guess when he doesn’t know. It is almost as if the robots are checking if we are still paying attention before they decide to launch their takeover of the world.

For those of you Luddites who haven’t switched over, using AI is like having a really sharp, hard-working junior who doesn’t know everything yet but who you know will take your job eventually.

But I don’t believe in using AI for creative processes because getting to the destination is the fun part of the creative process. And what else are you going to do with your time while Claude is crunching your spreadsheets?

How long will it be before these crafty tech bros start charging us the real (financial) cost of all those data centres? Like any crafty drug dealer, they will probably wait until the addiction has taken a firm hold once we have forgotten how to do our jobs without them.

All of this feels like turkeys voting for Christmas. But I wonder how it will all turn out. Will we reach Karl Marx’s utopia, in a world of plenty where the means of production do the heavy lifting while immortal humans live a meaningful existence in harmony with the earth and all its creatures and the data centres self-cool in space while being powered by the sun?

Or do we end up in a dystopian version of Mad Max where a clique of trillionaires control the earth from their impenetrable ivory towers while tribes of unemployed youths lacking in purpose pillage and destroy like swarms of locusts?