EVENT
The Princess of Asturias Award
The 2024 award from the Spanish royal foundation for Communication and Humanities — the institutional recognition of Han's philosophical project and the occasion for his most direct public intervention on AI.
In 2024, Byung-Chul Han received the Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities, one of the most prestigious prizes in the humanities globally. The award ceremony in Oviedo, Spain, gave Han a platform for one of his most quoted public statements on artificial intelligence: the insistence that AI can be used to steer, control, and manipulate people, and that the pressing task of politics is to control and regulate technological development in a sovereign manner, rather than simply keeping up with it. Han added a sentence that captured his philosophical core in institutional language: Technology without political control, technique without ethics, can adopt a monstrous form and enslave people. The award ceremony functions, in this book, as the event through which Han's two decades of diagnosis received institutional recognition at precisely the moment when the civilization he had diagnosed was accelerating beyond the capacity of its own institutions to respond.
