LW - Book review: The Quincunx by cousin it

The Nonlinear Library: LessWrong

Link to original article
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Book review: The Quincunx, published by cousin it on June 6, 2024 on LessWrong. The Quincunx is a 1989 novel by Charles Palliser, set in early 1800s England. I want to recommend it to everyone because it's really good, and it might be relevant to the AI transition. Let me try to explain. The surface level of the book is a kind of mishmash of Dickensian themes. The main character is caught in a complicated inheritance dispute involving multiple families, each having histories of murder, uncertain parentage, stolen and returned documents and so on. The plot contains numerous puzzles that are fun to solve, the amount of planning is really kind of amazing, there are tons of details and everyone lies or makes mistakes but it still connects logically. But the really interesting level of the book is the social level. The main character doesn't just progress through a bunch of plot puzzles; he also starts out as a child of minor nobility and then moves through society downward. His journey is a kind of descent into hell, ending up in the lowest levels of poverty existing in the early 1800s. The book is very well researched in that regard, borrowing a lot from the fantastic "London Labor and the London Poor". There are parallel plotlines involving rich and poor people, and the book paints a vivid picture of how the rich prey upon the poor. England at that time was conducting enclosures. Basically, rich people put up fences around common land to graze sheep on it. The poor were left with no land to grow food on, and had to go somewhere else. They ended up in cities, living in slums, trying to find scarce work and giving their last pennies to slumlords. In short, it was a story of mass impoverishment of the population, conducted by the state and upper levels of society, who all benefited from it. In the book we get a tour of all of it. From the countryside being hollowed out, to the city with the desperate search for work, the run-down lodgings, the drinking, prostitution, crime (we spend a bit of time with the protagonist living in a gang), the sometimes horrifying occupations that people are pushed into (like scrounging for coins in sewer tunnels under the city while avoiding tides). The injuries, disabilities, early deaths. Where Dickens called out specific social ills, like workhouses in Oliver Twist, in order to fix them, Palliser says society as a whole is unjust. His account is so historically detailed that it somehow transcends time, makes you feel that the same kind of events are happening now. How does your society treat the economically unfortunate? What if we come into another period where economic growth makes many people unfortunate to the point of homelessness? I think it's especially important to not forget about such stories because they give an analogy to what might happen with the rise of AI. If AI can do your job cheaper than you, and can outbid you for resources you need to survive (most importantly land) - and there are lots of other tools available to AI and AI companies, like crafting messages to make you exchange your savings for consumption, or spend money on lobbying for laws, and do it all superhumanly well - then we might be facing the same kind of future as the poor in The Quincunx. And the main reason I wanted to make this point, and write this review, is that AI alignment isn't enough to prevent this. All above things can be done legally. Can be done with endorsement of the state, as the state happily benefits from AI as it did from enclosures. And they can be done by AI which is "aligned" to people, because historically these things were done by people. There's nothing higher than people to align to. The regulator, the AI company boss and all these other nice people are no different in nature than the people back then. When given power, they'll ...