Pearl Lam: Welcome to the Pearl Lam Podcast. Today, I would like to introduce Suhair Khan. Suhair, I’m so happy you’re here. Can you briefly tell the audience about yourself?

Suhair Khan:  Sure. Thank you, Pearl. Lovely to be here with you. So, I am somebody who’s worked at the intersection of technology and design for a very long time. I have spent most of my career in the technology sector. I was at Google for over a decade and I now run an incubator in a think tank called Open-Ended. I’m also an academic and lecturer in a couple of universities here in the UK. And I’m a writer.

Pearl Lam: You know, I went on your website, Open-Ended. What is the Open-Ended community? Who are the people that you are building a community on? Because today, everywhere we go, all the technology are talking about community.

Suhair Khan:  Yes. So we started open ended really with the goal open ended…

Pearl Lam: Is it Open-Ended?

Suhair Khan:  It’s called Open-Ended Design. But we started really when I was still working at Google, with the goal of bringing together quite a niche community, which is global, which is creative people and engineers, computer science professionals, working at this intersection of what I call creative technology. So our community is one of creative technologists who define themselves as artists, who code, or coders who are artists. At the same time, it is a growing group of individuals, organisations, that feel that there is a fluidity between where their work ends as a creative and melds into building new technologies. The reason I did it was that I felt that there was a gap in defining this community. But also having been at Google for a long time, I felt that I was quite lucky enough to have a seat at the table with my own work. Because I work for a large company, I was able to define myself as somebody who worked in tech, who cared about art and culture and design, whereas I felt that people on the outside were not getting a seat at the table. And so I started off with a podcast series. And actually one of your guests, Thomas Heatherwick, was my, it was during COVID so he was my advisor at the time because I wasn’t really sure how to frame it and how to name the people I wanted to bring together. I thought about architects who make impact in positive ways, use technology, da da da. I was getting around myself and he was like, isn’t it about people like yourself? Aren’t you telling the stories of people who sit in your world and who maybe people don’t know about? And that’s how it started out and it evolved since then to, of course, being a community. But we host conferences, we host events, conversations, we write pieces, we do advisory, really thinking about the future of design and how to implement technology within organisations, within creative, practice in new ways.

Pearl Lam: What do you think? I mean, today, everywhere we’re talking about AI, right? AI this AI this. What do you think? How is AI going to impact design?

Suhair Khan:  Well, AI is everywhere.

Pearl Lam: I know everywhere. I mean, I can write a letter with it, I can do everything, right?

Suhair Khan:  I mean, in many ways it changes how we experience the world around us. So I would say fundamentally, one of the conversations we’re not having is about how AI affects our own experience with the world.

Pearl Lam: Exactly, exactly. Right.

Suhair Khan:  At the core of it, artificial intelligence, is machine learning. It is algorithms, which are stacked one on top of the other, mathematics, which is designed to bring us better and more efficient outcomes. So if we want to run through a data set more quickly, we use artificial intelligence or machine learning to get a larger set of outcomes in a shorter amount of time. What’s happened since the inception of modern AI about 30 years ago is that it is now much more accessible to all of us. So it went from being a tool used by computer scientists, mathematicians, scientists, to apply to large data sets, to come to new and more efficient outcomes, to being a technology that’s actually engaging all of us through devices, through platforms like chat, GPT, through robotics, through what we call embodied intelligence, to something that’s really changing, in my opinion, what it means to be human.

Pearl Lam: So you are saying that it will. I mean, if they can, if they can do everything that humans do, where is the creativity going to be? I mean, going to be, you know, creativity, compassion. Creativity is one of the very essential, what human can deliver. So are you saying that all these AI would actually take in the human creativity array?

Suhair Khan:  So I think about this a lot, and the short answer is no, because what is creativity? Creativity is feeling, experience, luck, spontaneity, good luck, bad luck. Creativity comes from all of the lived experiences that we all have that spur our own imagination. But I think it really depends on how we define creativity. If creativity means AI can write a best selling novel or an award winning film, probably yes, that’s going to be possible, whether now or in a couple of years, if we consider the way we define creativity in these outputs, if it’s about critical thinking, if it’s about really feeling, embodying one another, considering what makes us feel where our heart and our soul, you know, there’s a huge distance between these two things, the mind and the heart, then I don’t think it’s ever going to replace what we experience with the world right now. But these are very open questions. People are very worried. I don’t know if you’re following the Hollywood writers strike about, you know, a few months ago, even where both screenwriters and actors in Hollywood had to do a whole negotiation, trade union style negotiation, in which one of the issues at hand was artificial intelligence.

Pearl Lam: Absolutely.

Suhair Khan:  You know, who’s going to take the face of a famous actor and superimpose it for free on, you know, a machine learning built model, it’s very possible. So these are conversations we’re going to keep having, and technology will be more and more advanced.

Pearl Lam: I’m always thinking that AI has this intelligence. It’s based on data, okay? If you have certain data that they cannot find, so they cannot make appropriate answers. Right.

Suhair Khan:  So there’s a few things. Number one is that the data that’s right now going into most of the systems that, let’s say, are built off of AI that we’re familiar with is relatively limited, coming from Western countries, it’s learning off of itself. And what AI is doing, which is scary and concerning for a lot of us, is that it’s interrogating meaning and understanding.

Pearl Lam: Absolutely.

Suhair Khan:  And so it is limited to mostly a certain context. It’s also designed and built with all of the biases of a particular group of individuals, which is engineers and computer scientists, mostly in American based companies, this is limited. And so the bigger question becomes, what is intelligence? And I think we have to be really careful to separate the word intelligence from AI, because intelligence is not just a large data set pulled out of one part of the world.

Pearl Lam: What you are saying to me now is because of a limited data that they are farming, they have got all the data from the west, therefore susceptible countries like in Asia, what they are doing is when you press the AI, they can condition you about all the Western. I mean, I’m using cultural point of view. I’m not using anything. So therefore we will be conditioned to the impact that our evaluation of aesthetic will be completely Westernised, like nowadays already, because of movies. But it will be even in a more serious way, what they absorb all the data and then they also give it up. When we research, we see that every day, we see certain and what the AI consider as beautiful. So we say, oh, this is beautiful. So at the end, your children growing up looking at the same images, they would consider, oh, aesthetic, this is great. So that is what we are going to have, is what I hate is homogeneous culture. Something that I’ve been fighting about is homogeneous culture. I think AI is really fantastic because it helps out, it makes things so much more efficient. But if we have to learn, because one of the things that you were saying is to have machine learning, right? If we use the fact that what you are, you know what you’ll be saying and machine learning, then all our thinking and everything will become completely Westernised, in a way, is because in China or in Asia or in Pakistan, they have not share the data, so much data there. So what we are learning, what we are seeing, we will be completely the other side. That’s very scary. Right.

Suhair Khan:  The point you’re making is this, is that the data is learning off of itself. So the more it learns off of itself, the more it goes down a particular path. And what you’ll see in the news, for example, is we’re worried about deepfakes, about misinformation in elections, about racism and bias as a result of the way these systems are built. What’s a much more subtle point is the one that you’re making is that at what point is it giving us meaning and reason? And AI right now is mostly what is available to all of us, built off of text, but also image, as you said.

Pearl Lam: Image. Yeah, absolutely.

Suhair Khan:  And so there becomes, certainly at a very baseline, some sort of confluence of what is. Right, what is the truth, what is meaning, even in terms of translation, most of the data that’s inputted is in the english language. So even in the translation, you lose, as any of us would. You lose meaning, of course. Inflection, definitely. And so what does this mean for culture? I think this is a huge issue that is very difficult to address. So right now, you have a lot of countries in the world, as well as government bodies, looking at regulation and ethics, and UNESCO has just had a conference in Slovenia on human-centred AI.

Pearl Lam: What do you mean by human-centred AI?

Suhair Khan:  What do they mean by human-centred AI, because what defines a human? What does it mean to have shared values, shared ethics, a shared conception of what is right and wrong if you don’t have the table? People who come from different cultures, whether it’s indigenous cultures, whether it’s people who have that sort of rare confluence of what we were talking about earlier, you know, the Chinese experience of Confucianism, Shintoism, Buddhism, there’s 2 billion Muslim people in the world. Each of us has had a unique set of experiences. The demographics of the world are shifting to Africa, to Asia, to India. So for sure, if you’re not building in their insights, their experiences, their set of feelings about values, then you definitely have something which is pushing us to go down a path which is very much narrow. Having said that, I actually think that because it is right now a huge shift in numbers, we’re going to see a change. We’re going to see in the same way you have turkish television shows watched all over the world and mexican soap operas, K pop.

Pearl Lam: But it’s very different because that is what we watch. And now the AI is not what superficially is actually. I mean, it’s changing the way we think, the way we see things, our perception. So that is much more serious things because, you know, they, they self learn and they also preach because as soon as we do the research, as soon as we type the words, they send us all the articles and all the articles when we read is all, you know, Western based or sometimes it might be completely racial bias because. Not because they are racist, because they don’t have enough data.

Suhair Khan:  Yeah, for sure. I think this is a gap in a R&D. There should be R&D in computer science, in AI in a lot more parts of the world. Secondly, it’s a gap in dialogue between governments, obviously, as you and I know, on what is the future of these technologies. And finally, there is a bigger gap, which is of a gap that’s never going to be filled because as democratised as AI systems get, you know, large language models, which is what powers chat, GPT and powers. Now, a lot of the Internet, those are going to become smaller, cheaper to build, easier to access, but they’re not going to be accessible at all.

Pearl Lam: Hold on, hold on. Because now AI is only, I mean, we have, we discussed about it. The hardware AI is most prominent in China, but the software AI, like chat, GP is all in America and like in Asia, which other countries can build this. And also like in China, we don’t have this semiconductor designer chip. So in the future when we talk about advancement. I mean, on the software, it would be still in the west. So are we saying that because in the west they have all the data, so they will. I mean, we. No matter where you’re born from, India, Pakistan, China, you will come out, just have Western values because you. Because the way you’re trained by computer, because eventually you don’t go to school, you will be going and seeing from your computer screen and everything. You don’t even need a teacher. Right. And whatever we’re learning, we’re just learning to be, you know, the values.

Suhair Khan:  I think so. But I think that’s.

Pearl Lam: It’s very scary.

Suhair Khan:  You know, it is scary, but we need a lot more of what we’re creating today. You need more conversation, more education, more culture, and more celebration of uniqueness.

Pearl Lam: And that because I always believe what is the most important for young children or for any one of us is to have, is to be individualistic. Because I think, you know, I know that human beings also have this herd. We love to be in groups. We love, you know, this, this herd culture. But you need to be very strong, need to have confidence, determination to be individual.

Suhair Khan:  Yeah, of course. And. But we do live in a moment of disempowerment for most young people. As you know, it’s difficult to see your future, and you have access 24 hours a day. 8 billion people in the world pretty much have a smartphone right now, or access to the Internet in some capacity. But Internet information to be addictive.

Pearl Lam: Yeah, but don’t you think that, you know, a lot of information in the Internet, whether it’s social media or whatever, I mean, we’re talking about fake news, we’re talking about that, and we’re talking about a younger generation who’s not interested to read newspaper. They’re much more interested to get news from social media. And all that is spreading a lot of, you know, not very objective point.

Suhair Khan:  Of view, for sure. And we go into our echo chambers and we hear the same thing over and over. And we live in a world, of course, very polarised politics, which impact many billions of people. It’s not just the geopolitical situation is.

Pearl Lam: Not very beneficial for the younger generation.

Suhair Khan:  And to the point that you raised earlier on the physical, you know, we call it the technology stack. What is a stack of AI? Right now, it starts from the ground up. AI is not just you playing around, you know, with stability and coming up with a new drawing or a made up image. AI is about resource extraction. It’s about pulling silicon, lithium, rare earths out of the ground. It’s about data centres that are massive carbon emitters, it’s about building data centres next to deep and cold american rivers, because the amount of heat that’s generated because of large language models is basically incalculable in many ways. And of course it’s about geopolitics, it’s about trade, it’s about, as you mentioned, countries hoarding GPU’s, which are the microchips used to power these technologies. So we should not forget that whilst we have this conversation right now about, you know, what is the regulation around these technologies? Who defines what messages are being sent? How do we make sure that there’s universal values built into them and that more of us have cultural access to inputting into them? Actually, it’s a very real and physical industry. It’s a very old fashioned industry in some ways, because it’s built off of old school extraction, industrialization, manufacturing.

Pearl Lam: And actually that. That also hurts climate, isn’t it?

Suhair Khan:  Of course it has a massive impact on climate. Technology companies are probably the largest purchaser of carbon credits in the world because.

Pearl Lam: Of course, of course they use a lot of energy.

Suhair Khan:  Yeah. And they’re trying, too many of them to be carbon neutral, so they actually have a huge impact on our environment. And it’s very difficult to map and to track where it is, how much is it and where is it going to disappear. Part of this is because we’re worried about efficiency, as you know, we’re trying to figure out what happens next with our economies and inflation, what happens tomorrow between two big countries, how do we make better information faster? And we are lacking a consideration for what does it mean for our children? What does it mean for the future of the workplace? And finally, what does it mean for the future of feeling, communication, family, if we are to survive through climate change, through the temperature increase of waters by 1.5 degrees celsius into the future, what kind of world do we want to build? And until we start to have real conversations about these issues at a leadership level, we’re still leaving in the hands of corporate boards decisions on our future.

Pearl Lam: Right? Well, there must be discussion about these climate changes, about the impact of enough technology on that. How was it? You know, do you go to any of these?

Suhair Khan:  Yes, I had a couple of. I had a couple of talks at Davos and I went to a bunch of conversations and Davos is amazing because you have people from around the world in conversation. The greatest concern is obviously climate. The other greatest concern which was interesting was war, because we have at least three to four major wars in the world right now. And that is of concern to CEO’s and business leaders.

Pearl Lam: Asia is peaceful so far.

Suhair Khan:  Asia is peaceful so far.

Pearl Lam: So far. So far.

Suhair Khan:  And hope it stays that way. And then, of course, AI, you know, I think you could talk AI onto the name of a country now. Like, it was literally the topic of.

Pearl Lam: Every conversation, especially the last year. Everything is AI. And with the chappie, the chatbot’s coming. Everything is talking about.

Suhair Khan:  But you know who had the most insightful conversations and comments? Of course, there was people much smarter than myself, much more important than myself there. But it’s the academics, it’s researchers from Stanford, from MIT, from Tsinghua University in China having conversations, oh, some from IIT India, on the design of these technologies.

Pearl Lam: Design of these technologies, or the worries or the concern about the AI, the risk of having too high. I mean, high technology AI, that would damage.

Suhair Khan:  Can I be honest? There were those conversations, but it was a lot more about movie. But a lot more of the conversations are right now around how can we channel these technologies to do good. And I think part of it is that maybe it’s what I attended. Part of it is Davos is a business gathering. How can we use this to make more money, to cut costs, to be more efficient? Which is all fine. I think that right now on the risks of AI, there is a concern that very few people in the world understand where these technologies are going. And the truth, of course, is that if we leave them to evolve without any regulation, we’re going to be able to see exponential harms from these technologies. I think that that conversation is actually going to be, let’s say, quote unquote, solved at an R and D level. I think we need the makeup.

Pearl Lam: Can you build compassion into AI? So, can you do an algorithm that can define compassion, that can equate to compassion?

Suhair Khan:  Do you know that if I pinched your arm right now and I asked you how much it hurt, the only way I could quantify that is by your telling me if I say one to ten, you’d say five, right? And if some, like there was a rugby player, he’d say two. The issue becomes, this is, what’s the relativism? What are we creating? How does it make me feel? Versus a vulnerable teenager, versus somebody who feels isolated, versus an American computer engineer? And so I think conversations we should be having, you mentioned the word community in the beginning, is, how can we solve in a more thoughtful way for groups of individuals that we can support? Artists are doing amazing work on this you have Sougwen Chung, who is an incredible artist. She’s Canadian. She’s right now based in London, working with robots. To consider the conversation.

Pearl Lam: You must introduce me.

Suhair Khan:  I will introduce you today. She’s brilliant, beautiful, smart, eloquent, and her artistic practise is based on a conversation with a robot where they’re teaching one another. What does it mean to paint and to create? Where’s the difference between the aesthetic and the functional? How can we consider technology in new ways? How can we step outside of ourselves? And then, of course, there’s philosophers working on this question of consciousness.

Pearl Lam: Philosophers are very important to work on these and this transformation, because what is the meaning of doing all that? I mean, these are things that I think we need to think about it. And it will be great if you can teach an AI to think about these. These are knowledges which needs to be shared. And I understand why you have your open-ended community.

Suhair Khan: Thank you for saying that. So on the philosophy, here’s another really important conversation is so far, the way we’re designing these systems is out of a paradigm that came 400 years ago, the age of the enlightenment. We’re building around a very Western centric model of philosophy. What does it mean to be successful? What is progress? What if we were to step outside of that and actually use AI as a new tool to add new windows and walls to the mind as architecture? And to say, what if we considered other perspectives the more than human, other species, but also obviously other cultures, other languages, other sets of meaning? And that is where I think we start to have a really interesting and positive conversation around what is philosophy, you know, which culture defines what is right, what is wrong, what is meaningful? And it isn’t so esoteric, but the.

Pearl Lam: Philosophy is only come up with your everyday life because so you have Western philosophy and these philosophers stay within that parameter, the live, and then they come up with their philosophy. Obviously chinese philosophy and Western philosophy different because always then philosophy, the roots is.

Suhair Khan:  The Greek philosophers, of course, and it should be different. And this is where I think we should be owning the AI narrative. In other parts of the world, it’s good to copy and build, but what about changing the way we engage with this and seeing it as a new way of building for the future? So one of the talks I did in Davos was on spiritual intelligence and AI.

Pearl Lam: Spiritual intelligence on AI. Wow. How, how do you link the spiritual intelligence in Aih?

Suhair Khan:  I was in conversation with a friend of mine who is a healer, she’s a teacher of Kabbalah. She’s from Israel.

Pearl Lam: Love. I healers.

Suhair Khan:  Yeah, I love healers. I love healers as well.

Pearl Lam: Because we’re Asians.

Suhair Khan:  Because we’re Asian. And also maybe we’re seeking as Ram Das, who is not Asian, who studied at Harvard, worked with LSD, and he studied, you know, spirituality. So the question became, what is spirituality? Who defines it? And secondly, where is that gap between what is cognitive intelligence, which is, let’s say, AI, versus creative intelligence, the intelligence of your body and the intelligence of what you believe in? 84% of the world defines itself or self identifies as religious. That is something we don’t talk about in technology companies, really. It’s not how we think about building algorithms and models. And it doesn’t mean that we have to solve for it or fix it. It’s more that if we are to consider new ethical regimes, new value systems, how we keep our own cultures intact, we can’t pretend that it’s just about language or it’s just about pictures on the wall.

Pearl Lam: No, it’s not. It’s much deeper than that. That philosophy, that more that value system.

Suhair Khan:  Exactly.

Pearl Lam: The value system is so different from Asia to. And to the. To the west. So all that is fundamental. But that fundamental is not learned by your AI.

Suhair Khan:  No. Well, it’s not going to learn what it doesn’t want to learn.

Pearl Lam: And also, it’s not. I don’t think that they don’t want to learn. It’s just that we don’t want to feed them too much data.

Suhair Khan:  I think we should be thinking about where. I think this is a moment where we should be, especially in Asia, frankly, even in Africa, it’s a moment of empowerment. I met recently the minister of culture from Nigeria, and she’s actually working with the minister of technology to think about where there can be a confluence between their arts and their culture, their food, all of the different.

Pearl Lam: I just did a podcast with this really amazing young artist who’s also a dj, and she graduated from Stanford and all that. And she is exploring African philosophies.

Suhair Khan:  Amazing.

Pearl Lam: Which is just by oral transmission. So it’s like family passing through. And it’s really amazing because she’s saying that. Who said that? There’s no African philosophy. So she was. It was very, very interesting.

Suhair Khan:   I’m going to listen to this. I would love to hear it, because exactly this. Who tells us what is right and wrong?

Pearl Lam: Exactly.

Suhair Khan: But equally, we have to be careful of, like, tagging too many things in, is saying that, you know, I will come to your country and tell you that indigenous people, frankly, have a voice that I want to programme into AI or. We’ve been looking at animals, so there’s a lot of research done on whales and how whales using AI to translate the voices of whales. On the one hand, that’s very interesting. On other hand, this is a human tendency to anthropomorphize, to add, to create meaning.

Pearl Lam: Absolutely, absolutely.

Suhair Khan:  It doesn’t really belong to us. And that sense of where we can let go and really consider where the environment can be supported.

Pearl Lam: Because I think at the end is different cultures we have to respect and we have to respect different cultures, but we have to celebrate differences. I mean, or else the world would never be at peace.

Suhair Khan:  Exactly. I’m doing a project with Tom Dixon, your friend on marine intelligence. You know, we’re looking at new material design for a project that he has worked on for 1015 years, really, as Tom does on coral and how you.

Pearl Lam: Many coral is completely damaged. Coral reefs are completely damaged. That is why you have the shark attack.

Suhair Khan:  Exactly. And also coastal erosion. A loss of biodiversity.

Pearl Lam: Absolutely.

Suhair Khan:  And his project is beautiful. It’s really about using coral as a material that could eventually replace concrete to protect coastal shorelines in the world. So we changed the way we’re investing in protecting our planet by using natural, natural materials. And so there was a long conversation about how do we use technology, how can we use this to make this better and faster and more efficient? But actually, what we realised was that it was about the coral growing and the way that it’s been trained to grow by Tom and his project, which will take time, but where technology could be helpful was in doing something that’s actually very difficult to do, which is to map the ocean floor. And so we’re looking at how you can build a digital twin, which is basically like a snapshot of a particular part of the ocean, which will help us to track and measure, over time, biodiversity, numbers, water temperatures, the growth rate of coral, and to project into the future how we might build that. So it’s not technology solving anything, because.

Pearl Lam: I thought most of the coral reef has been destroyed is because the water pollution, right? Because the water has been so polluted, every big container is built. After all the gas so slowly, sincerely, all the coral reef disappeared.

Suhair Khan:  Pollution and water temperature rise, which is.

Pearl Lam: Both because of, can be helped. You know, we still want our engine to be moved to. So what can be helped to preserve the corals and clean the water, you.

Suhair Khan:  Have to regenerate, you have to add more coral. Also, cleaning the water is a much bigger issue, especially with issues.

Pearl Lam: The ocean is so big.

Suhair Khan:  I think Yves Behar is doing a cool project on cleaning the ocean.

Pearl Lam: Come on, look at Japan. Japan has been pouring the nuclear water into the deep ocean. Did any of the countries stop them? No.

Suhair Khan:  The reason I’m telling you this example is that you don’t have to solve for everything. When you talk about design and technology, you can say you care about expertise, you care about R&D, you care about craft, you care about, let’s say, material. And then you want to consider new ways of engaging with challenges in ways that are unique. And the power of artists, creatives, designers, is always this, is that you’ll see the world a little bit different. You ask different questions of yourself and of other people. And so when we think about culture going forward, when we think about Asia, whatever, religion, spirituality, we have to think about what makes us different, and that is what we can channel into technology. And unfortunately, we’re in a position where technology companies are able to really, at this point, saturate our experience of the Internet, of tech, of our phones, in a particular way. But it doesn’t mean that we can’t use our numbers, our sheer numbers, young people, people outside of the web. You know, right now, we’re living and working in what is now being called a post Western world of the whole world. Shifting the axis of truth, the axis of who should define our value systems, is moving. That’s a fact outside of just a Western narrative. So for innovation, does it have to be built and designed in the same way as AI is being built and designed in the west? Of course, we can think of new ways of doing it, but we have to do it in a patient way. And we also have to be okay with it being smaller than what we’re being told, successes.

Pearl Lam: You know what is amazing is when I’m talking to you, is I was thinking, when we talk about differences now, we all talk about how important about differences. I mean, decades ago, a few decades ago, the whole world is manufacturing robots, we go to school, everybody wants to be and be the same. And now, I mean, with all these technology coming in, with the world is consistently changing. Now we recognise differences is actually very important, important to the way that we learn from each other. And hopefully with this AI technology, it would not be, it would not. We were not talking about invasion, but we’re talking about how a technology can help us to live and to understand each of the cultures better.

Suhair Khan:  Of course, imagine it as a portal into our own consciousness. And that’s how we should look at it.

Pearl Lam: Consciousness is really, you know, how can.

Suhair Khan:  We be collaborators with these technologies to have new ideas, to think about things that we wouldn’t have thought about before? And I do think that this whole kind of the industrial mindset, right, of separating, of siloing. Think of Leonardo da Vinci. He was an artist and an architect.

Pearl Lam: He’s not a discipline. But when art, after the second world war, what completely changes, because what has happened is they want to put everything in a box. Just. Just remember Bauhaus. Bauhaus is about multidiscipline. You put. You put writers, musician, you know, a poet, painter, they all are together because it’s that multidiscipline, which is, this is why you have your community, of course. And this is why, you know, it is really beautiful because you can inspire each other and by discussing with each other, you may find out a better solution.

Suhair Khan:  Yeah. And I also think, you know, one of the things you don’t realise is how you can empower each other.

Pearl Lam: Absolutely right. Absolutely right.

Suhair Khan:  And we don’t, you know, we talk a lot about mentors. We talk about people that we can look up to. But actually, in my career, my mentors have always been people sort of of my age group who are in completely different industries.

Pearl Lam: I always thought that parents who always tell the children, oh, you can become like, blah, blah, blah. You can, you know, have a hero, you can become like this, you know, following your mentors. I think this is completely wrong. Why don’t you teach children to be themselves, to actually grow up understanding themselves and be strong enough to be yourself? No parents has ever asked any. Any children to be. To be themself. They always say, oh, this. This person is like this, you know, you always have this mentorship or this hero that you want to be. Like, why? Why can’t we be ourselves? Why can’t any parents encourage children to be themselves?

Suhair Khan:  I think it’s about listening.

Pearl Lam: I think it’s so important.

Suhair Khan:  I think also there’s like a bigger issue that comes from that, is that we do have a lot of invisible people in the world right now. We saw that during COVID You know, it was great if you had nature or a nice house, but if you were in a small home, if you were a migrant worker in India and someone said, go home, where do you go? And the same with technology, it’s created a whole greater ecosystem of totally invisible people who are not serving. And so when you talk about children, how can we raise young people, wherever they are, to feel that they’re special, they matter and they should be empowered to speak up, to have a voice that is. That is actually.

Pearl Lam: That’s so important. Not just now, now about, you know, this world with technology. Even when I was growing up, I mean, we’re put in schools, right? Everybody has to behave like. Like the other person. No one. No one has ever told me, none of my friends have ever told and told their children, be happy, be yourself. The most important thing is understand yourself, be yourself and love yourself. That’s the most important thing.

Suhair Khan:  And be kind. And people kind of. I love the idea. In the UK, they have this concept called a forest school. I have a little goddaughter and she’s in one, and you go and you play around. You spend all of your time in forests, in nature and in trees, and you learn to listen and to feel, and it’s cold and every day is different, and if it rains, you all have to go in a certain direction. If there’s an emergency, you have a way of working. They work with things like knives, things that we never give to children. They’re trusted to decide for themselves in ways that are very much about feeling and experiencing. And it’s not to say regular school is good or bad, but I think there’s something there.

Pearl Lam: Confidence is so important.

Suhair Khan:  Yeah. And to trust themselves.

Pearl Lam: Yeah, to trust themselves.

Suhair Khan:  And I think in my own work and my own career, you know, there’s every single day you have, you question yourself and I’ve realised, you know, if you don’t follow a path, you didn’t follow a path. I didn’t. You kind of try and find your own way and you have to seek out people who can guide you, who can hold your hand, who can inspire you more than anything. And in that, you have to learn to trust yourself, but also to trust other people. And that is about going beyond having a job, getting your salary, listening to a boss. It’s about saying, if you’re going to pull me out, I was reading Osho this morning, the idea of what does it mean to take a risk and live bravely? And that is something that nobody teaches us.

Pearl Lam: That is about confidence. You have to have the self trust, and I think a lot of school system just rip away this, this basic needs. Without self trust, you don’t have confidence.

Suhair Khan:  Yeah.

Pearl Lam: And you have confidence you cannot enter the big.

Suhair Khan:  Well, it’s also the ranking, so I’m not an expert on this, but in Finland, they were actually the number one educational primary and secondary school country, ranked in the world. And in recent years, their ranking has dropped because they decided as a government, to focus more on critical skills, on asking why and how and not just getting the best grades, because they realised with technology, with social media, the skills they needed to build were about asking questions. And with tech, with like your and my job, in ten years or 20 years, or with the whole team here, our jobs are going to change. The truth of AI is that it’s going to take away a lot of jobs. It’s going to change through automation, a lot of how industry is run, how manufacturing is conducted, travel, transportation. We’re going to be in self driving cars in not a very long time. What does that mean for young people? It means that they’re going to have to find new ways of having value. In some ways it’s going to liberate them. They can be creative, they can build new worlds, but they’re not going to be able to figure out ways of surviving without confidence and trust, but also without critical thinking.

Pearl Lam: Critical thinking is very important, but I don’t think many schools have taught about critical thinking. That would be a complete change of education system.

Suhair Khan:  Yeah, I have a longer term project on this. It’s like, how do we build a new kind of school where it is multidisciplinary and multicultural? It’s decentralised, you know, you don’t have to be in one country one time.

Pearl Lam: No, decentralised is important. Let’s talk about your. What you. You are talking about decolonization and decarbonize, right? Explain that. Explain that to the audience, which is very interesting.

Suhair Khan:  Well, I learned these words actually recently. I started to teach a course a few years ago at Central Saint Martin’s in London, which is a very famous fashion school. It’s also a very important school for art architecture, and it was right next to the Google offices. So I spent a lot of time there. I did a lot of collaborations with them and I taught this course. I started to teach at the beginning of COVID on spatial practise, which is, let’s say architecture, our experience of the world around us, and digital technology. And I designed a course to work with young architecture students to consider how the experience of our world is actually shaped in many ways by the thoughts in your head, because of your phone, by your consciousness being split across your WhatsApp and your Instagram and your Facebook, but also on a real design perspective, on some of the conversations we’ve just had. What is a data centre? How do you build it? How should it be? How should we envision the architecture of a large language model? How can we consider new ways of building and designing. And then finally, of course, how can you channel emerging technologies into design and building? And the course was framed around decolonization and decarbonization. Decolonization is a very loaded term right now because of the ongoing conflict in the Middle east.

Pearl Lam: It represents they were all colonies and being split up.

Suhair Khan:  Well, the legacy of imperialism.

Pearl Lam: I’m from a colony.

Suhair Khan:  Well, so am I. I’m from two. My mom’s from India, my dad’s from Pakistan. And the reason I’m from two countries is because of the British Empire.

Pearl Lam: We’re the last colony being liberated.

Suhair Khan:  Yeah, that’s true, actually. There’s, you know, most of the world’s wars right now. Sudan, of course, in the Middle east are in countries that are still bearing a lot of the weight of their colonial legacy. And of course there’s a whole west versus others conversation. But what is decolonization in diverse countries? We’re lucky to be in the UK, where many people live side by side from different religions, ethnicities.

Pearl Lam: I really, truly believe that UK is a melting pot of different cultures.

Suhair Khan:  It is. That’s why we’re in a museum, which is, you know, thinking about the future of design. Having said that, there’s very few critical frameworks that I had working in technology in Google around what does it mean to address issues of race, gender, ethnicity, identity, accessibility, inclusion, and on the decarbonization side, ecology, environment, sustainability? We don’t have those frameworks because they have to come from academia, they have to come from research and they have to come from doing it.

Pearl Lam: There are so many articles written about inclusive and inclusiveness, you know, nearly, you know, the last, the last five years. So it is an issue that people are talking about and decolonization, I mean, this has. This world has been going on for like decades, but I think the real impact now you see all these Middle-East crisis, then you really see what the hell.

Suhair Khan:  Well, I think it comes down to inequality. We have inequality between economies and within economies. So at the core of it, people feel socially excluded, economically excluded and politically excluded. And I think that’s a very real conversation for the next generation. You know, there’s generation alpha, which is born. I think after 2010, I should cheque the numbers. But let’s say we look at Pakistan, they have experienced flooding, they’ve experienced Covid, they’ve experienced the evolution of the Internet, all of the Western issues of that loneliness, isolation, and they’re looking at a climate crisis, which seems insurmountable. How do we confront these issues in countries that are poorer you know.

Pearl Lam: When I read about Pakistan, when I look at Pakistan, okay, beside all these different problems, you also have your religious problem, your inequality, your gender inequality and all that. That. So it’s quite. And today you have big political issues.

Suhair Khan:  Yeah.

Pearl Lam: So with all that coming, do you still go back to Pakistan?

Suhair Khan:  I visit. My parents live there. They live in Islamabad. And I’m very involved with an organisation called the Himalayan Wildlife foundation. It’s a conservation charity that basically protects the national parks in the northern areas of Pakistan. And. And I find that part of it is privilege. I can go back and I’m safe. My parents support my working, my travelling.

Pearl Lam: This is really rare, right, in a Muslim country. And you’re not even supposed to have education. You should be married now.

Suhair Khan:  I should be married. I agree on that. I should be married.

Pearl Lam: But beyond that, arranged marriage is not so simple.

Suhair Khan:  Arranged marriage is usually more successful, but that’s a separate conversation. I think what Pakistan represents is the future problems or ongoing problems of a lot of the world right now. Populism, extremism, isolation, economic decline, geopolitical chaos, and a lack of a governance structure, because there’s actually an identity that was formed 75 years ago in a country that was carved out of India by the British Empire without a plan. 20 million people died in the creation of an independent India and a newly stated state of Pakistan.

Pearl Lam: Before what I read up, because I wasn’t there, that Indians and Pakistanis, they live very happily with each other.

Suhair Khan:  Everyone was fired.

Pearl Lam: Never have been a problem.

Suhair Khan:  Thousands of years.

Pearl Lam: Yeah. Why all that happened? It’s just so sad.

Suhair Khan:  Yeah. You know, a conversation I had recently, I don’t know if it’s something you’ve thought about, is around. What does it mean? Reflect on your past. You know, how South Africa, Rwanda had the truth and reconciliation commissions. Colombia had something similar with the rebels. And nobody has done that in South Asia. And I have been wondering a lot about. Maybe it’s too late, but the idea of what does it mean to reflect on your past? And can we create spaces? Maybe that’s where technology can help. Because we inherit trauma, we inherit wounds. You know a fact, you know, your DNA carries pain.

Pearl Lam: So many of the Chinese way or the Asian way on our part, is very different. Like, unlike Cambodia, you have the popol, the populace, a genocide. I met some of the Cambodians. Even in Paris, they decided that, you know, they don’t have revenge. They just forget about it. They start a new life. I mean, I think most of them are Chinese, but Chinese as a. I don’t know. It’s good or bad, but Chinese, whatever, whatever. They never want to mention anything about trauma.

Suhair Khan:  No, we don’t either. We hate talking.

Pearl Lam: They want to be a world. Even if you’re a victim, you want to show yourself as a hero. So you never hear about anything like, you know, the older generation, actually, they couldn’t even visit Japan because of the mass massacre during this sino japanese war. Of course, the younger generation, we all love and love Japan, and there was always this problem between Japan and China and all that.

Suhair Khan:  But I think there’s here, like, a lot of what we don’t have. That belonging, heart, heartbreak, and how you can separate. And that’s very interesting. It’s very cultural, right. Choices that we make. I think one thing that is a yemenite, possibly a result of technology, social media, even though, if you look at the numbers, you know, a lot has been written about this by people like Steven Pinker. We live in a nonviolent world compared to 100 years ago. We have access to, you know, we have lower child mortality, less wars. But we do live in an age of loneliness, and we live in an age of anxiety.

Pearl Lam: Absolutely right.

Suhair Khan:  And that anxiety and loneliness around the world. And so when we consider the young generation, the one I mentioned, generation Alpha. Alpha, where do they go next? What do they remember and what do they forget? How do we consider how we can empower them to believe in themselves, to be stronger, to connect with one another, and to create new outcomes without losing their own language, their own culture, their own set of, you know, what their grandparents should be teaching them. This is the problem of our times, and it is something that I think governments should be thinking about, because it cannot be solved by individuals. This should be in the room. They should be sitting in the meeting. This was a. So when I started open ended, I used to feel like I’d be like, you know, relatively. I’d try and look older, and there would be all these, like, very successful men at the table. And my friends who are doing the work, who are architects, designers, computer scientists, engineers, researchers, were behind the scenes. And I used to feel really guilty, first of all. And I used to. I used to think, I don’t want to hear any of these CEO’s telling me what they think like in Davos. Frankly, I wasn’t interested. I want to meet the artist. I want to go in the basement of the museum and meet the curator of the fish at the Natural History museum. I want to know the people who have the insight, the knowledge, and the heart to be doing what they do every single day. And that’s where we need to be bringing young people to the table. And it’s whether it’s in a conversation like this, whether it’s in government policy making. You know, I recently met somebody who said, oh, it causes a bit of friction because it wastes a bit of time and they’re too woke and they have a problem with everything. Shouldn’t we be made to feel a little bit uncomfortable for the world? That feels too easy and too simple. Shouldn’t we leave the room with a question? One of the girls on my team is dyslexic, and she’s taught me a lot about neurodiversity. We always have. I always have to spend ten more minutes asking her why she said something that she said, and same with her. And we leave feeling like we’ve each learned something. So should we not change how we think about learning? And also, finally and very important for technology time. So in your culture, you have ten year plans, 20 year plans. In most religions, you think in terms of lifetimes and lifetimes afterwards. Why do we think in terms of quarterly cycles? Why are we worrying about what happens in a year’s time? How do we change? There’s a concept cathedral thing which is used a lot in design. Now, what’s a thousand years from now? Should we not be worrying about that? It doesn’t matter if we’re not allowed. And that is where the value, I think, system really matters. What matters? Is it today or is it your children? Or is it the planet? Is it the tree that’ll survive a few hundred years? Or is it worrying about how much money or I have?

Pearl Lam: And I’m happy that you are in several advisory board.

Suhair Khan:  Thank you for saying.

Pearl Lam: Thank you Suhair for joining me. It has been such an interesting encounter. We must continue to talk and to speak to each other. I am learning a lot from you.

Suhair Khan:  I loved meeting you. Thank you.