Manou Rimer

"Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make."

— I.J. Good, Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine, 1965

I'm Manou — a junior at Stanford studying Symbolic Systems & AI with a minor in Creative Writing. I'm drawn to the deep questions at the intersection of philosophy, cognition, and AI safety: what it means for a system to understand, to reason, to be aligned with human values.

Resume Email Substack GitHub

Intellectual Timeline

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High school — Freshman year

Philosophy & Storytelling

SLE at Stanford — a year-long deep dive into the Western canon. Philosophy, literature, and the questions that don't resolve: meaning, consciousness, the good life.

Nietzsche — The Gay Science Atwood — Oryx and Crake Aristotle — Nicomachean Ethics Liu Cixin — The Three-Body Problem

Sophomore year

Symbolic Systems & HCI

Narrative as technology. Learning to think in structure, image, and time — how form shapes meaning across mediums. Discovering code as a creative medium.

Nagel — What Is It Like to Be a Bat? Merleau-Ponty — Phenomenology of Perception Ge Wang — Music Computing Design: Technology in Search of the Sublime

Junior year — now

AI Safety

The philosophical questions I've always cared about — mind, meaning, control — are now urgent engineering problems. Studying Symbolic Systems & AI, working toward alignment, writing through it.

Casper — Achilles Heels for AGI/ASI via Decision Theoretic Adversaries Kokotajlo et al. — AI 2027