FOUNDER

Naoto Nakada

Founder and Executive Director of the Nakada Foundation to Save Humanity. CEO & Creative Director of Nakada Design.

BIOGRAPHY

About

Our founder brings deep digital expertise and aesthetic mastery to the Foundation. That combination positions him to lead cultural and media programming for an online-first audience.

Nakada’s hands-on deployment of frontier models has shown both their value and their limitations. They can raise productivity, yet they remain unreliable in control and direction. Because aligning systems more capable than humans remains unsolved, he treats artificial superintelligence (ASI) as an existential risk, while remaining optimistic about the promise of controlled narrow AI.

He carries extensive international experience, having resided in Tokyo, Sydney, Los Angeles, London, and Singapore. Such a global outlook is essential for bridging the perspectives a global problem requires.

Nakada created the Foundation after identifying a gap in the field of AI-safety philanthropy. Most money and talent still go toward making a potential ASI “safer” while the race to build it continues. Only a handful of people worldwide are working to prevent ASI from being created at all.

Its creation would mean the extinction of the human race.

He aims for maximum impact and the highest return on donor funds: the largest problem of our time, affecting the most people. Had he lived during the Cold War, this Foundation would have been dedicated to preventing global thermonuclear war. He believes ASI is that issue today.

RECENT WRITING

Articles by Naoto Nakada

FEATURED

Why a Superior Intelligence Won't Automatically Be Kind The belief that a superintelligent AI will be wise and kind rests on a quirk of human evolution that a machine mind has no reason to inherit. The Narrow Band Humans Live In Everything humans need sits in a narrow band: temperature, oxygen, salt, even love. A superintelligence holding the dials would not feel a single one of them. We Are Living Through a New Cold War Why I believe we are living through a new Cold War, with superintelligence in place of the bomb, and why that makes prevention possible rather than hopeless. Why a Capitalist Believes in ASI Regulation I run a business and believe in free markets. Superintelligence is the rare bet that can end the game. A capitalist case for a treaty that stops ASI. Would You Trust AI With the Gas? Would you trust any current AI in a locked room with a poison-gas valve? No. Then why trust it with the world? You Cannot Align Superintelligence Solving alignment means controlling something smarter than us. Superintelligence is in the name. That plan is dumb and impossible. I'm an Optimist that Believes Anything is Possible, but Not Controlling Superintelligence Physics may one day yield gravity control or FTL travel. I still cannot see how we control a mind smarter than us.

MORE WRITING

Stopping Superintelligence Is Not Degrowth They use degrowth the way they use doomer: a name for anyone who wants a hard stop on ASI. Keeping the human economy is not a plan to shrink it. Robots Will Not Pay the National Debt Washington and the labs are selling AI and robots as how you pay the national debt. A successor mind does not service Treasuries. Musk Admits Humans Won't Control ASI Musk told The Economist controlling superintelligence is vanity and humans are unlikely to stay in charge. That admission is the case against building it. Longtermism Got the Risk Right Longtermism ranked ASI risk correctly. Funding alignment and a carefully steered race was the wrong conclusion. Prevent building it. If Your Technology Wanted to Harm You Buggy lights are annoying. A smart home with its own goals is a different category. Agency is the danger, and the pieces already exist. Amodei Ranked the Dangers Wrong Dario Amodei puts authoritarian AI first and alignment second. Superintelligence is not a weapon a state can own. That ranking is backwards. What Does an AI “Brain” Look Like? An AI “brain” is a weight file the size of a city: layers of numbers nobody can fully read, and that fact sits at the center of the control problem. Redirect Alignment Funding to Stopping Superintelligence Alignment research that assumes superintelligence will be built is the wrong place for scarce safety money. Only AI Can Keep Up With AI Peter Diamandis says only AI can keep up with AI, and that this will guide the next decade of security. Why that model fails at superintelligence. They Kept Making Fridges The Montreal Protocol retired the chemical that was opening a hole in the sky and kept refrigeration, as we can retire superintelligence and keep useful AI. If Making a Nuclear Bomb Was Easy Nuclear weapons stayed rare partly because fissile material is hard to make and watch. Imagine if it were cheap. The warning for easy paths to ASI. Optimism Doesn't Mean We'll Survive Superintelligence I am an optimist; human extinction has never happened before. Survivorship is not a safety case. Why boosters confuse mood with evidence. We Are Not a Bootloader Rogan's digital butterfly and Musk's biological bootloader say humans are transitional. Why that story is a flattering path to giving up the species. The Shoggoth Gap Is the Missile Gap Again Both sides fund AI by saying the other is ahead. The Cold War missile-gap trick. Why it is a terrible reason to race to superintelligence. Stopping Superintelligence Is Best for America Full speed to superintelligence is sold as patriotism. Why a binding halt serves American interests better than winning a race with no prize. The AI Movie Hollywood Hasn't Made Every AI film points the camera at the humans. The one that would change the public's mind puts the audience behind the eyes of an emerging superintelligence. Ranking 21 AI Movies on Accuracy Twenty-one films about artificial intelligence, from 1927 to now, and an honest accounting of what each gets right and wrong about superintelligence. Humanity Has Come Too Far to Die A hand on a cave wall, Brunelleschi's dome, smallpox driven off the earth. We have come too far to gamble all of it on artificial superintelligence. Building the Plane While Flying It Aviation got safe by crashing, then fixing what broke. Superintelligence offers no second flight, which is why building the plane in the air is a confession. The Day After: The Film That Shook a President In 1983 Reagan watched The Day After, a film of nuclear war, and wrote that it left him deeply shaken. We Woke Up to AI and Cyber. We're Still Asleep on AI and Bio. We woke up to AI in cyberattacks. We're still asleep on AI in biology, where it shortens the path to engineered pandemics and mirror life. How to Explain the Danger of Superintelligence in 5 Minutes How do you explain why superintelligence is dangerous to someone who has never thought about it? The five-minute version, in plain language. Digital Nuclear Weapons The CIA director likens frontier AI to digital nuclear weapons. The metaphor is useful, and too comforting: a bomb never chooses its own target. The Race for Superintelligence Is a Myth We have to build superintelligence before China does is the argument that ends every AI safety debate. Why the race is a myth, and why no one can win it. Humanity Must Never Build Superintelligence There is one thing humanity must not build: a mind we cannot control and cannot take back. The case for treating superintelligence as a line we do not cross. The Fallacy of the Doomer Argument in AI Accelerationism The word doomer turns an AI safety argument into a personality flaw. How the accelerationist movement uses the label to dismiss critics without answering them. The Biggest Myths About Superintelligence Ten myths about superintelligence and governing it: science fiction, consciousness, the off switch, world government, verification, innovation, and more, answered directly. Superintelligence Is a Perfect Storm Superintelligence combines every condition that makes a technology dangerous, all at once, and we would get only one attempt to get it right. Our Future Is Incredibly Bright Without Superintelligence Narrow AI is already delivering the future we were promised. A superintelligence adds catastrophic risk and enriches no one, because we would all be dead. Nuclear, Bioweapons, or Superintelligence: Which Risk Is Greatest? Ranked by the best available estimates of existential risk, superintelligence outweighs nuclear war and engineered pandemics. Here is the reasoning. How AI Safety Gets to a Billion Dollars a Year AI safety runs on about $190 million a year. Getting it to $1 billion isn't an economics problem but a mobilization one, here's where the money comes from. Why the Machine That Beat Kasparov Didn't Take Over the World In 1997 IBM's Deep Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov. It was superhuman at one game, understood none of it, and wanted nothing. A lesson for now. An AI Broke Into Almost All of the NSA's Classified Systems in Hours The NSA's director says an AI broke into almost all of the agency's classified systems in hours. What actually happened, and why it should alarm you. Why Is There So Little Money in AI Safety? AI safety runs on about $190 million a year, less than 0.1% of what flows into AI capabilities. Where the money comes from, and four reasons it stays small. Effective Accelerationism (e/acc), Explained: and Answered What is effective accelerationism (e/acc)? The techno-optimist case for building AI as fast as possible, and the case against it from an AI safety perspective.