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 rising senior at Stanford studying Symbolic Systems and AI and minoring in Creative Writing. I’m interested in technical AI safety, ethics, and philosophy of mind, especially how AI systems represent the world internally and what that means for alignment, persona, and moral status.

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.

Lindsey et al. — The Persona Selection Model: Why AI Assistants might Behave like Humans Cloud et al. — Subliminal Learning: Language models transmit behavioral traits via hidden signals in data Kokotajlo et al. — AI 2027