The Wubi Effect

When we think of China today, we think of a technological superpower. From Huawei and 5G to TikTok and viral social media, China is stride for stride with the United States in the world of computing. However, China’s technological renaissance almost didn’t happen. And for one very basic reason: the Chinese language, with its 70,000 plus characters, couldn’t fit on a keyboard. Today, we tell the story of Professor Wang Yongmin, a hard-headed computer programmer who solved this puzzle and laid the foundation for the China we know today. Special thanks to Martin Howard. You can view his renowned collection of typewriters at: antiquetypewriters.com. EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Simon Adler Produced by - Simon Adler Sign up for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Signup (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected]. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Hey, I'm Latif Nasser. This is Radiolab. So I've been seeing headline after headline lately about how the US is in a race We need to compete with them. With China. We are in this high-tech competition with China. Over AI. AI arms race.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  The country that leads in technology tends to lead the world. We need to win the race here in the United States.

• 0:22Speaker 00

  And this AI technological arms race, if you want to call it that, has been making me think about this episode that our senior producer, Simon Adler, made back in 2020. The story he tells is the story of another arms race between China and the US, one that took place in the 1970s and 80s over a piece of technology that we now completely take for granted. Crucially, though, the story starts at a moment when China, instead of being the technological superpower that it is today, was about to be left behind. And the way that they caught up sort of set the table for this whole AI situation we are in right now.

• 1:07Speaker 00

  Simon did a great job with it. It is a super fun story to listen to. So, without further ado, I give you the Whoopi Effect.

• 1:17Speaker 02

  Wait, you're listening?

• 1:24Speaker 03

  You're listening to Radiolab.

• 1:27Speaker 04

  Radiolab. From WNYC.

• 1:36Speaker 00

  Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. This is Radiolab. To start things off today, a couple months ago.

• 1:42Speaker 05

  You want some coffee? I'll get it. Too small? I'm gonna get an Americano.

• 1:45Speaker 00

  In that magical, forgotten time before the coronavirus, our reporter, Simon Adler, somewhat mysteriously walked me a few blocks from our office, mic in hand, to a coffee shop.

• 1:58Speaker 06

  Okay, with our coffee purchased, let's go stand in the corner where it's maybe a little less loud.

• 2:02Speaker 00

  Sort of a fancy one. Exposed brick, bare Edison bulbs.

• 2:06Speaker 06

  So let's gaze out upon the hipsters of Lower Manhattan.

• 2:10Speaker 00

  Your intention is to survey and count the number of laptops?

• 2:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, so how many laptops do you think are in here?

• 2:15Speaker 07

  Okay, starting from the left, we're gonna circle around. We got one, two, three, four, five, six.

• 2:22Speaker 06

  Two more on the bar.

• 2:23Speaker 07

  Two more on the bar.

• 2:24Speaker 06

  And they're all typing the same way, right? Or they're all using a QWERTY keyboard?

• 2:29Speaker 07

  Uh, yeah, yes. And the reason he dragged me there, as I now know...

• 2:33Speaker 06

  Now, let's imagine we're in Shenzhen in a Chinese Starbucks.

• 2:38Speaker 07

  ...was to point out a massive cultural difference hidden in plain sight. And to propose a bit of a reporting trip. Are you gonna send somebody to Starbucks in Shenzhen?

• 2:48Speaker 06

  Well, that's my hope, that I will be the one sent to a Starbucks in Shenzhen.

• 2:53Speaker 07

  Well played, Adler.

• 2:54Speaker 06

  Now, you did not bite on that reporting trip.

• 2:57Speaker 07

  Nope.

• 2:57Speaker 06

  Plus, pretty soon thereafter, traveling to China became a lot more difficult, so...

• 3:04Speaker 08

  Okay, I'm in this big Starbucks shop here in Hong Kong.

• 3:10Speaker 06

  To play out this comparison I had in mind, instead, we hired and sent local reporter Yang Yang to scope it out for us.

• 3:19Speaker 08

  There are about 50 people here, maybe 30 laptops or tablets open.

• 3:26Speaker 06

  Because, and here is where we get to the point, everyone in this Starbucks...

• 3:32Speaker 08

  You know, typing and writing and browsing on the internet.

• 3:35Speaker 06

  ...were all using their keyboards in a different way.

• 3:39Speaker 07

  What do you mean? So, using it in different ways, in the way that they use the keyboard, or that the keyboards that they're using themselves are different?

• 3:46Speaker 06

  The physical keyboard's going to be the exact same thing. They're QWERTY keyboards, just like here in New York.

• 3:51Speaker 07

  Oh, okay, I didn't know that.

• 3:52Speaker 06

  But like, even if everybody in this Chinese Starbucks was really into dogs, it was a dog convention, and so they were all typing the word "gou", which is dog in Mandarin, no two people would be typing the word "dog" the same way.

• 4:07Speaker 09

  That's right. There could be 50 different ways that that keyboard is being used to type the Chinese language.

• 4:14Speaker 06

  This is Professor Tom Mulaney.

• 4:16Speaker 09

  I'm Professor of Chinese History at Stanford University.

• 4:19Speaker 06

  Okay, and this is the doorway into the grand mystery, it would seem.

• 4:24Speaker 09

  Yeah, because, I mean, in theory, there are an infinite number of different ways to type Chinese with the QWERTY keyboard.

• 4:35Speaker 07

  I don't even know what that means. How is that possible?

• 4:38Speaker 06

  Well, it turns out that figuring out how to type in Chinese on a keyboard

• 4:43Speaker 09

  was one of the most complex engineering, linguistic, and conceptual puzzles of its time.

• 4:50Speaker 06

  It's a puzzle that threatened to erase an entire culture, nearly prevented China from becoming the technological superpower that it is today, and says a whole lot about where all of our communication is headed.

• 5:11Speaker 06

  Alright, so before we get into why typing in Chinese is such a crazy, difficult problem to solve, let me introduce you to one of the guys who actually set out to solve it.

• 5:25Speaker 10

  Hello. 我今天十点，我十点半都一直在等你。

• 5:29Speaker 08

  Hello, Simon. Hi.

• 5:31Speaker 06

  Hello, is everybody here? Can you all hear us? Professor Wang Yongmin.

• 5:36Speaker 08

  Yes, Professor Wang is here. You can talk to him.

• 5:38Speaker 06

  My interpreter, fixer, and really co-reporter on the China side of this, Yang Yang, and I spoke with him a couple of months back. Professor Wang, I think of you as sort of, almost like the Chinese Steve Jobs. Is that a fair way to think of you?

• 5:58Speaker 10

  这个从金钱的，从资本和金钱的角度来衡量的话。

• 6:03Speaker 08

  He says that he is nowhere close to the wealth Steve Jobs held.

• 6:08Speaker 10

  A famous man.

• 6:09Speaker 08

  But in terms of his fame and reputation.

• 6:13Speaker 10

  科技的说。

• 6:13Speaker 08

  Yes, it's a fair comparison.

• 6:17Speaker 06

  Professor Wang was born in the 1940s in a small rural village.

• 6:21Speaker 10

  几亩地，家里自己有几亩地。

• 6:24Speaker 08

  Growing up in this village, they had wheat and corn.

• 6:27Speaker 10

  一个就是 countryside。

• 6:29Speaker 06

  His family farmed, and his dad was also a carpenter, but it was a hard scrabble existence.

• 6:35Speaker 08

  His family was so poor that they couldn't afford any clothes for him.

• 6:40Speaker 10

  第一个印象就是发现。

• 6:41Speaker 08

  And because they were dirt poor, he understood at a very young age that going to school was not a small thing.

• 6:49Speaker 10

  说从上小学一年。

• 6:51Speaker 08

  So he studied extremely hard.

• 6:53Speaker 10

  一直到我上科技大学，我学习成绩从来都没有得过第二。

• 6:56Speaker 08

  He said that from the first grade all the way to university.

• 7:00Speaker 10

  永远都是number one. Always the number one, OK?

• 7:03Speaker 08

  I am always the number one.

• 7:07Speaker 06

  And all that hard work paid off. He was selected to attend the University of Science and Technology of China, which is basically the equivalent to MIT.

• 7:16Speaker 08

  And after graduating from college, he was assigned by the government to a research institute located in this remote district.

• 7:26Speaker 06

  And this wasn't just any research institute.

• 7:29Speaker 10

  在那个研究所，很重要的研究所，most important的这个研究所。

• 7:33Speaker 08

  It was a top secret, highly classified national defense research institute. Even the locals didn't know what these people were doing there.

• 7:44Speaker 06

  And the top secret, highly classified work that was going on there was building computers, which, which in China wasn't just an engineering question. It was much deeper. Keep in mind, this was the early 1970s.

• 7:58Speaker 09

  And everyone that was paying attention knew that computing was going to change the fabric of economy, warfare.

• 8:05Speaker 06

  Again, historian Tom Mulaney.

• 8:07Speaker 09

  Communication, everything.

• 8:09Speaker 10

  62年这个入大学嘛，这个

• 8:11Speaker 08

  But at that time, China was just starting to enter this field and

• 8:16Speaker 10

  出现电脑嘛

• 8:17Speaker 08

  was lagging behind.

• 8:19Speaker 06

  I mean, the best estimates I could find say that around that time, in the entire country, with a population of nearly a billion people, there were only 3,000 computers in use.

• 8:32Speaker 09

  Why is that? Well, the simple reason is the Chinese language could not fit inside a computer.

• 8:40Speaker 06

  Meaning what? So in English, we put our words onto the page or the screen by shuffling around these 26 letters, right?

• 8:49Speaker 11

  Say them with me. A, B, C,

• 8:53Speaker 06

  Each one representing a sound in the word.

• 8:55Speaker 11

  F,

• 8:56Speaker 06

  And the writing, in fact, tells you how to say the word.

• 8:59Speaker 11

  B, I, G.

• 9:02Speaker 08

  Big.

• 9:03Speaker 06

  Well, Chinese writing is completely different.

• 9:06Speaker 12

  The person character is placed next to a tree to convey the idea of resting.

• 9:11Speaker 06

  When you write in Chinese, you aren't writing down the sounds of the words so much as you're drawing a picture of each word.

• 9:18Speaker 12

  Three trees here are combined in the character for? Sun. To mean a forest.

• 9:23Speaker 06

  This Chinese writing goes back at least 3,000 years. And in fact, some of the earliest known examples of it were found on artifacts in Professor Wang's home province.

• 9:34Speaker 10

  3,700 years ago, in the殷商.

• 9:36Speaker 06

  In this writing system, these characters grew out of an attempt to represent the actual things in the world around us. Water, stars, animals, actions, feelings.

• 9:49Speaker 10

  Chinese is based on图形说话.

• 9:52Speaker 08

  You can see a thing, see a picture, a long history in a Chinese character.

• 9:59Speaker 06

  So that today, there are more than 70,000 of these Chinese characters. Each a unique visual representation of a word or an idea. And so the problem was, in the 1970s, computers had only a few bytes of memory, not even enough to store a single email message.

• 10:21Speaker 09

  And so the available memory on most of these, on all of these computers, commercially available computers, couldn't even store the Chinese character set.

• 10:32Speaker 06

  Huh. Or display them on a screen, or even print them. Like, again, back in the day, the 1970s, the way we're printing things is with dot matrix printers, right?

• 10:42Speaker 07

  Oh, I remember, yeah.

• 10:44Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 10:45Speaker 09

  Where these tiny needles strike the paper, composing letters out of a set of little dots.

• 10:51Speaker 06

  Paper pixels.

• 10:52Speaker 09

  Paper pixels, exactly. It takes way more pixels to produce a Chinese character than it does to produce a letter of the Latin alphabet.

• 11:01Speaker 06

  And so inside these printers, those little needles weren't packed densely enough to tattoo a legible character onto the page.

• 11:10Speaker 09

  And, and if you take those pins and shrink them to get more paper pixels in a pinhead, well, what happens is they bend and break.

• 11:21Speaker 06

  Because they are not tuned metallurgically, they're not tuned to being that size. So it's not as if China could simply just buy these computers wholesale because the English language, the Latin alphabet, was in effect being baked into the architecture. In some cases, the very matter and materiality of these machines.

• 11:48Speaker 07

  Wow. That's funny. Like, you know, we talk sometimes about algorithm bias, but I had never realized there was this huge cultural barrier in the basic hardware of the computer.

• 12:00Speaker 06

  Totally. And I mean, for China, this was seen as an existential threat. Like, consider the fact that because of these limitations into the 80s, they were forced to conduct and tabulate their senses with pencil and paper.

• 12:17Speaker 07

  No [BLEEP].

• 12:18Speaker 06

  And so, by lord, if China couldn't figure out a way to computerize Chinese or to Chineseize computers, then it was going to be on the outside looking in.

• 12:40Speaker 06

  So this was the problem they were trying to solve at that top-secret research institute.

• 12:47Speaker 06

  And the full magnitude of it, of this problem, really smacked Professor Wang in the face when he saw his first fully-formed Western computer, which amazingly, because he'd been focused on such a hyper-specific electrical problems, didn't happen until about eight years into his research.

• 13:08Speaker 06

  He remembers seeing it in a local printing shop. The first ever in real life. He was totally amazed.

• 13:17Speaker 10

  他那个机器都

• 13:19Speaker 08

  Uh yeah, I mean, that was incredible.

• 13:22Speaker 06

  But then, he says, he looked down at the keyboard attached to the computer and saw the Latin letters, and he thought, like, wait, how am I supposed to type 70,000 characters with just those 70 keys? Like, how are we going to fit the Chinese language on this thing?

• 13:40Speaker 09

  That would be the equivalent of trying to get all 26 letters of the Latin alphabet onto less than one key.

• 13:48Speaker 10

  个很大的键盘，像办公桌那么大，

• 13:50Speaker 06

  And as Professor Wang began looking into this, he found that the consensus at the time was it simply couldn't be done.

• 13:59Speaker 10

  那些人，他们就

• 14:00Speaker 08

  At that time, there was a saying that

• 14:03Speaker 10

  叫计算机是汉字的掘墓人。

• 14:05Speaker 08

  Computers are the gravediggers of Chinese characters.

• 14:10Speaker 07

  Gravediggers?

• 14:11Speaker 09

  Oh, totally. People were making very loud calls for the absolute abolition of character-based writing.

• 14:20Speaker 07

  You mean like throw out Chinese characters altogether?

• 14:22Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 14:22Speaker 10

  在助产士。

• 14:23Speaker 08

  It was like a doomed day.

• 14:24Speaker 07

  Because of this very thing.

• 14:26Speaker 06

  It was a big part of it. And so tons of folks in the field of computing were arguing

• 14:31Speaker 09

  We've got to replace Chinese with Esperanto, or with English, or with something else, so that we can participate in global modernity.

• 14:41Speaker 06

  Behind the plans is the realization that China must modernize or starve. There was even a government body, the State Commission on Language Reform, that was looking into how to do this. However.

• 14:56Speaker 10

  我这个理工科学

• 14:57Speaker 08

  Wong wasn't convinced.

• 14:59Speaker 10

  实属秦话。

• 15:00Speaker 06

  He thought there has to be a way to type in Chinese and save the Chinese character.

• 15:05Speaker 10

  我是酷爱汉字。

• 15:06Speaker 08

  He called it destiny. He felt like it was fate.

• 15:09Speaker 06

  And he was convinced that if he couldn't do it, if he couldn't find a way to save the character.

• 15:14Speaker 10

  所以我就是不知道成功，不知道

• 15:16Speaker 08

  Chinese culture would be over with it too.

• 15:18Speaker 10

  生死都不顾了，那

• 15:20Speaker 08

  "Quote unquote." So I didn't know if I would succeed. I didn't know if I would fail. There was no return, regardless of life and death.

• 15:31Speaker 06

  Whoa. So dramatic. It's so dramatic.

• 15:35Speaker 08

  But it was. It was really pressing for him. Yeah.

• 15:38Speaker 06

  And for good reason, because in fact, Chinese writing had nearly been wiped out once before. And we're going to get into that right after this break.

• 15:50Speaker 13

  After some actual fake polls came to light, pollsters are in the hot seat. But they say, don't be too quick to dismiss the entire industry.

• 15:59Speaker 03

  People want to raise taxes on the rich. I can tell you that definitively because we know it from polling. And if we lose trust in polls, we have no way to understand what Americans want to be done.

• 16:12Speaker 13

  On this week's On the Media from WNYC. Find On the Media wherever you get your podcasts.

• 16:23Speaker 07

  OK, three, two, one. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

• 16:26Speaker 06

  And I'm Simon Adler.

• 16:27Speaker 07

  This is Radiolab, and today, China's technological twist of fate. And before the break, Simon, you introduce us to a guy named Professor Wang, the man who was tasked with solving this problem, which it sounds like he took pretty seriously.

• 16:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, and for good reason, because the Chinese writing system had almost disappeared once before. To set the scene, it's the 1910s. China is emerging as a nation out onto the world stage. And they're noticing technological advancements in the West.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  A Chinese visitor to the US, let's say, he goes to the Ford company corporate headquarters.

• 17:04Speaker 06

  Historian and collector Martin Howard.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  Well, walking in through the front door and down the halls to the administrative area, what they're going to hear is a cacophony of sound.

• 17:14Speaker 06

  OK.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  It's going to get louder and louder. And then he's going to turn the corner, and he's going to be faced with rows and rows of hundreds of typists typing away.

• 17:23Speaker 06

  And these typewriters, in businesses across the United States, were literally remaking English communication.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  Simon, it was a revolutionary machine, a paradigm shift.

• 17:34Speaker 05

  The typewriter speed queens are lined up to show the world how fast they are.

• 17:37Speaker 06

  For three basic reasons.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  Number one.

• 17:40Speaker 05

  And there are.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  Speed.

• 17:42Speaker 05

  A tap tapper setting the keyboards on fire.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  One could type four times faster than a clerk could write with a pen.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  Number two. You know what it's like reading other people's handwriting? Some people's handwriting is goddamn awful. Legibility. Awful to read.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  The third reason, making copies.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  Think about that. If it's four times faster and you're producing 10 copies at the same time, one could argue that's 40 times faster. I think my math is right there.

• 18:13Speaker 06

  I think so.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  If it's 20 copies, then it's 80 times faster. That's mind tingling, right?

• 18:19Speaker 06

  And so China's like, we have to have that speed, that efficiency.

• 18:23Speaker 09

  We have to have these machines.

• 18:25Speaker 06

  And so some 50 years prior to Professor Wang's problem, you had people saying.

• 18:30Speaker 09

  We've got to get rid of Chinese.

• 18:32Speaker 06

  I mean, Mao himself advocated for either throwing the Chinese character out completely or at a bare minimum, adopting an alphabet so that they could spell out the way characters sound.

• 18:43Speaker 09

  Yeah, he was one of the chorus. And so the thought there was that if you alphabetize the Chinese characters, you could then lay it out on a keyboard and the problem goes away?

• 18:54Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 18:55Speaker 09

  Okay.

• 18:56Speaker 06

  Now, obviously Chinese writing did not disappear. And there was actually a Chinese character typewriter, several of them in fact. And what's striking about it, the model that won the day is just how un-typewriter-y it is.

• 19:13Speaker 09

  This is a typewriter with no keyboard.

• 19:15Speaker 06

  It's this clunky yet eloquent device with just two levers, one for your left hand, one for your right. And then this big tray bed full of metal characters. And using those levers, you move the tray bed vertically and horizontally to line up the character you want.

• 19:34Speaker 09

  And then press down on the lever that your right hand is holding. And in one fell swoop, sort of ba ba ba, the metal character gets sucked into the type chamber.

• 19:44Speaker 06

  The character swings further up towards the page on this metal arm.

• 19:47Speaker 09

  Oh, like a jukebox, the way it reaches in and lifts up a record?

• 19:50Speaker 06

  Exactly. And on its way up.

• 19:52Speaker 09

  Rubs against a ink spool and then strikes the paper. Printing the character onto the page.

• 20:00Speaker 06

  Before finally.

• 20:01Speaker 09

  The arm swings back down and the force of it doing so.

• 20:05Speaker 06

  Spits that metal character back into the tray bed.

• 20:09Speaker 09

  Dang.

• 20:10Speaker 06

  And well, you could only type about half as fast on one of these as you could on a quirky English typewriter. I mean, it worked. It was enough to stave off the death of the character.

• 20:23Speaker 10

  就必须把他们找出来的六百多个东西放到

• 20:25Speaker 06

  And for Professor Wang, fifty years later, it was a sign.

• 20:30Speaker 10

  简直的学法学究。

• 20:31Speaker 06

  A sign that instead of forcing the Chinese language to bend to the will of technology, technology could be bent to the will of the Chinese language, the Chinese character.

• 20:42Speaker 10

  那这三个东西才是

• 20:44Speaker 06

  And so to do that, he actually started by breaking down the Chinese characters themselves.

• 20:50Speaker 09

  Because, well, let's face it, even though Chinese doesn't have an alphabet, that doesn't mean that every character in Chinese is absolutely unique and singular in a snowflake. There are pieces and components and shapes that reappear over and over in these different characters.

• 21:07Speaker 10

  就好像化学世界找到原子

• 21:09Speaker 08

  Just imagine this is chemistry. There are tens of thousands of molecules in chemistry.

• 21:18Speaker 10

  是我首先提出来的。

• 21:19Speaker 08

  But there are only one hundred or so atoms.

• 21:23Speaker 10

  不是理工男想不到这些事的。

• 21:25Speaker 06

  Professor Wang believed that if he could just figure out what the atoms of Chinese characters were.

• 21:30Speaker 10

  那是一个一个木字旁。

• 21:32Speaker 09

  The components of characters, like a, like a, like a shape alphabet.

• 21:37Speaker 10

  按照规律，有规律性的。

• 21:38Speaker 06

  That he could put those on the keyboard and that people could then.

• 21:42Speaker 09

  quote unquote spell Chinese characters not by sound but by shape.

• 21:47Speaker 06

  Now, to help visualize this, let's take the character for river, Jiang, which looks like a capital I with three dashes to its left, two near the top and one near the bottom.

• 22:00Speaker 09

  Got it.

• 22:01Speaker 06

  Now, this character Jiang contains two components. The first is that capital letter I and the second is those three dashes. Now, on its own, that capital letter I is actually the character for work. And those three dashes actually represent water.

• 22:22Speaker 07

  Huh, so work plus water equals river.

• 22:25Speaker 06

  Correct. And just as with this character Jiang, these quote unquote work and water components often appear in combination with other components. So for example, those three dashes, the water component, are present in the characters for juice and sweat and soup. Anyhow, so what we just did, taking a character and breaking it into its parts.

• 22:51Speaker 10

  所以现在汉字虽然很多，但是你不要害怕，因为它都是文

• 22:55Speaker 06

  is what Professor Wang began to do as he searched for the most common and fundamental of these components. He got himself a room, emptied it out of everything but a couple desks. And with a small staff he'd assembled, he took 10,000 characters and began breaking them apart and making note cards.

• 23:16Speaker 08

  Yeah, note cards.

• 23:18Speaker 06

  One note card for each component of each of the 10,000 characters he was dissecting. So like Jiang, river would get two note cards. One with the I on it, one with the three dashes on it.

• 23:34Speaker 06

  When this was all said and done, what he had laying out on these various desks.

• 23:41Speaker 08

  Were 120,000 cards. If you stacked them all together, they were like 12 meters tall.

• 23:49Speaker 06

  About the height of a three-story building. But of these 120,000 cards, many of them were duplicates or triplicates or quadruplicates. Like there would be at least four cards with the same water component on them, right? One from the character for river, another from soup, and two more from sweat and juice.

• 24:15Speaker 06

  So from there, what he did was sorted all of the common components together. All of the water components on that table, the work components over there, leaving him now with just several thousand piles. Several thousand components. Clearly still way too many to put onto a keyboard. So he did it again. Broke each of those components apart and made more note cards and regrouped and repiled the new common components.

• 24:44Speaker 10

  You不能放在字母键上。

• 24:45Speaker 06

  And he did this again.

• 24:46Speaker 08

  Boiling down, lower.

• 24:47Speaker 06

  And again.

• 24:48Speaker 10

  一百三。

• 24:49Speaker 08

  And lower.

• 24:49Speaker 06

  And again, and again.

• 24:51Speaker 10

  一百二十多个。

• 24:52Speaker 08

  Lower and lower.

• 24:53Speaker 06

  Restacking pieces of paper.

• 24:55Speaker 08

  Yeah, just passing cards.

• 24:57Speaker 06

  Wow. Professor Wang did this for five years until he had it down to 125 components.

• 25:06Speaker 10

  Mendelius发明了汉，呃，化学原子周期表，

• 25:09Speaker 06

  The periodic table of Chinese, as he referred to it.

• 25:13Speaker 07

  And then how would you type with this periodic table?

• 25:17Speaker 06

  Well, just like texting on a flip phone. You remember texting on a flip phone where each number key represents three different letters? So that to type, say, the word dad, you'd just type 323. Well, just like that.

• 25:30Speaker 10

  然后我就把这一百多个。

• 25:32Speaker 06

  Professor Wang placed five or so of these components on each key of the QWERTY keyboard. So that by typing in the component pieces of a character,

• 25:42Speaker 10

  比如说组字频度的问题啊。

• 25:44Speaker 06

  The computer would sum them up for you and generate it on the screen. He named his creation

• 25:50Speaker 10

  WuBi字形。

• 25:51Speaker 06

  The WuBi method.

• 25:52Speaker 10

  那是神圣的。

• 25:53Speaker 08

  And described WuBi as

• 25:55Speaker 10

  那是一个圣坛。

• 25:57Speaker 08

  A sacred invention.

• 25:59Speaker 06

  All he had to do now was convince the rest of the world.

• 26:04Speaker 06

  He got that opportunity in 1984.

• 26:07Speaker 14

  Mr. Secretary General, thank you for granting me the honor of speaking on this first day of the 38th session of the General Assembly.

• 26:18Speaker 08

  He was invited to the United Nations to present his invention.

• 26:23Speaker 06

  When he arrived, he sat down, set up his computer, you know, to demo it. And with a bunch of people watching him, he took a deep breath and started typing. And immediately

• 26:33Speaker 08

  The deputy secretary

• 26:35Speaker 10

  刷刷刷地往外跑

• 26:36Speaker 06

  Who was standing over his shoulder watching

• 26:39Speaker 08

  Was astonished to see Chinese characters rapidly appearing on the screen.

• 26:46Speaker 06

  In fact, she was incredulous.

• 26:48Speaker 08

  You know, they thought one had played a trick on them.

• 26:54Speaker 06

  They asked him to stand up and step away from the computer.

• 26:56Speaker 08

  And they flipped the keyboard.

• 26:58Speaker 06

  Looking for some hidden piece of hardware.

• 27:01Speaker 08

  And at that time, one replied

• 27:04Speaker 08

  You know, what?

• 27:04Speaker 10

  It's just your keyboard.

• 27:06Speaker 08

  It's just your keyboard. It's the same keyboard. And after this, he and WuBi went viral. He became one of the top 10 biggest names in China.

• 27:19Speaker 06

  He and WuBi were on the front page of newspapers. He was licensing WuBi all over the world. This sound is actually from an infomercial for WuBi, filled with flying photos of Professor Wang sitting next to important people. I mean, for China's version of July 4th.

• 27:41Speaker 08

  China's National Day.

• 27:44Speaker 08

  He was chosen as the head of ceremonies of Henan Province.

• 27:48Speaker 06

  I'm imagining him as like the leader of the parade with his baton in hand, marching down the street.

• 27:55Speaker 08

  Totally, totally, yeah.

• 27:58Speaker 06

  And then, that same year, his crowning achievement.

• 28:08Speaker 08

  April the 4th, 1984.

• 28:14Speaker 08

  Hu Yaobang, the head of the Communist Party, came to visit Professor Wang.

• 28:22Speaker 06

  And sitting down with him, the most powerful man in China at the time.

• 28:26Speaker 08

  After Wong explained his invention, Hu Yaobang stood up

• 28:33Speaker 08

  and asked

• 28:36Speaker 08

  Comrade Yongming, do we still need to forsake Chinese characters? And Wong replied

• 28:45Speaker 08

  No, no. Chinese characters don't need to be replaced. They can be efficiently input, just like English.

• 28:56Speaker 06

  Hu Yaobang went back to Beijing and, according to Professor Wang, not long after.

• 29:01Speaker 08

  The State Commission for Language Reform.

• 29:04Speaker 06

  That government body looking into how to do away with the Chinese character.

• 29:08Speaker 08

  Was closed, shut down.

• 29:11Speaker 06

  In no small part.

• 29:12Speaker 08

  Because of Wong's invention. Companies were using Ubi. Students were taught to use Ubi. Learning Ubi became synonymous with learning how to use the computer.

• 29:26Speaker 06

  He had saved thousands of years of the Chinese language and given it a place in the modern world. And as far as Professor Wang was concerned.

• 29:36Speaker 09

  To be this person was to be placed alongside, I don't know, Ford, Thomas Edison.

• 29:43Speaker 06

  Steve Jobs, perhaps?

• 29:44Speaker 09

  Steve Jobs, yeah, the sort of singular genius inventor.

• 29:52Speaker 06

  So he sort of, at this point, has slayed the dragon. He is the victor.

• 29:59Speaker 08

  He was, or he thought he was. The battle hasn't finished.

• 30:08Speaker 06

  In fact, it was only beginning.

• 30:13Speaker 07

  When we come back from break, Chinese typing gets predictive and the keyboards start directing us.

• 30:32Speaker 15

  This week on The New Yorker Radio Hour, will House Democrats try once again for impeachment?

• 30:37Speaker 04

  Let's not make a fetish out of impeachment. Let's not make a taboo out of impeachment. We understand it's not a panacea, but it is an essential tool in the constitutional toolbox that's always there.

• 30:48Speaker 15

  Congressman Jamie Raskin joins us next time on The New Yorker Radio Hour from WNYC. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

• 31:04Speaker 07

  JAD, Radio Lab. Back to producer Simon Adler.

• 31:07Speaker 06

  So before the break, Professor Wang had seemingly solved this massive technological linguistic challenge and saved the Chinese character. He'd found a way to type Chinese with a plain old QWERTY keyboard.

• 31:21Speaker 07

  But thinking back to the beginning, when you took me to that café, Simon, and we heard about all the different ways people were using the keyboard in that Hong Kong Starbucks, how did we get from Wong doing, making his method, to suddenly like infinite ways of typing?

• 31:39Speaker 06

  So first of all, while Professor Wang really cracked this thing open, he wasn't alone. I mean, there were others who had been hammering and chipping away at this problem as well. So from the beginning, you had a few variations, a few different ways to type. However, after Woobi, things do really explode. Because underlying Woobi was this subtle but spectacular departure.

• 32:04Speaker 09

  The keyboard changed from something where what you typed was what you got, to a system where you were telling the machine certain features or characteristics of the Chinese character that you wanted on the page, or I guess on the screen.

• 32:21Speaker 06

  Again, historian Tom Malini.

• 32:23Speaker 09

  That seems like a minor distinction when you say it, but once you do that, once you have entered into a reality in which A is not equal to A, I don't, I push the button that has the little symbol A on it, and I no longer expect that symbol to appear on the paper or the screen, effectively, I can set the letter A equal to any property of the Chinese character that I want.

• 32:50Speaker 06

  A could equal that water component, or that work component, or something far more abstract.

• 32:56Speaker 09

  Anything goes. And so in the early 1980s, different ideas about how to do this started to flood in.

• 33:05Speaker 07

  Oh, you mean beyond Woobi?

• 33:07Speaker 06

  Oh, yes.

• 33:08Speaker 16

  At that time, many people and companies developed their own IME.

• 33:12Speaker 06

  This is Joe Ming.

• 33:13Speaker 16

  Joe Ming, computer scientist in Microsoft Research Asia.

• 33:17Speaker 06

  And he was really on the front line of this development.

• 33:20Speaker 16

  Immediately, there are over 1,000 methods developed and put into use.

• 33:27Speaker 06

  So just a couple of quick examples here. Some of these broke the characters into components that looked like English letters.

• 33:35Speaker 07

  Does that mean look at the characters and be like, I think there's a D in that picture?

• 33:39Speaker 06

  Exactly. And then place those components on their English look-alike key. So A represented a sort of mountain peak-looking component.

• 33:47Speaker 07

  Wow.

• 33:48Speaker 06

  Others looked to English spelling. So the component for tree was represented by the letter T. Others had you input just what was present in like the four corners of the character. And then going even further afield.

• 34:01Speaker 09

  Some of these don't even use letters at all. They just use the numeral bank of the keyboard.

• 34:07Speaker 06

  You know that square number pad on the right side of of most keyboards? In essence, every character was given its own numeric code that you would tap in there. 4303, dog, 9080, fire. Almost like a clerk ringing up vegetables at a grocery store checkout. And we're just scratching the surface here.

• 34:27Speaker 07

  It's starting to dawn on me what you mean when you say if we go to that Starbucks. Everybody would have their own preferred way of going from those 26 Roman letters to the thousands of different Chinese characters.

• 34:42Speaker 06

  Right. And I'll say that the competition between these methods got heated.

• 34:47Speaker 16

  Yeah, people are actually fighting each other.

• 34:49Speaker 06

  Oh, really?

• 34:50Speaker 16

  Really. For example, in some.

• 34:52Speaker 06

  Ming says at one conference he attended, someone actually had to be thrown out.

• 34:56Speaker 16

  Yeah.

• 34:57Speaker 06

  Because of a fight.

• 34:58Speaker 16

  This kind of thing happens.

• 34:59Speaker 06

  And what they were fighting and arguing over was just like with the typewriter way back when. Speed.

• 35:05Speaker 09

  Every single new input system, the inventor claimed, we haven't achieved maximum speed yet. And that my system, it's easier to use and faster.

• 35:16Speaker 06

  And and one way they went about this, pushing the limits of the speed, was by trying to predict what it was the typist was trying to say.

• 35:24Speaker 09

  Both predictive text and auto-completion were anticipated in Chinese information technology decades before they were in English language computing and new media to get to the character you want faster and faster.

• 35:39Speaker 06

  So the way this began was you'd be typing in the components of the character. But before you'd finished typing them all in, it would guess what it thought you were going for and offer you a couple of options.

• 35:50Speaker 09

  And it would give you those options ranked by the probability that this is the one you want.

• 35:57Speaker 06

  But then even that wasn't fast enough.

• 35:59Speaker 09

  Almost immediately, people started to think about next character suggestions.

• 36:04Speaker 06

  So predicting and suggesting not just the character you were trying to type, but also the next character, the next word you were going to type.

• 36:11Speaker 09

  And so if someone types in the character Bei, meaning north, it is a very high likelihood that the very next character is going to be Jing for Beijing, or maybe Beifang for northern. So I'll give you that as a suggestion.

• 36:25Speaker 06

  And keep in mind, this is the 1980s, a full decade before we had anything comparable here in the United States. Anyhow, right as all these technological changes were taking place,

• 36:39Speaker 06

  the Chinese language itself changed.

• 36:41Speaker 02

  Tomorrow, ABC News will begin conforming to the Chinese standardization of its language's spelling and pronunciation. Pinyin, it's called.

• 36:48Speaker 06

  China went all in on Pinyin.

• 36:51Speaker 07

  Pinyin?

• 36:52Speaker 06

  Pinyin.

• 36:52Speaker 09

  Pinyin is a way of using the Latin alphabet to spell out the sounds or the pronunciation of Chinese characters and words.

• 37:01Speaker 07

  Interesting. So it's an oral, oral, oral?

• 37:05Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 37:05Speaker 07

  Au.

• 37:06Speaker 06

  Au.

• 37:07Speaker 07

  It's an oral translation.

• 37:08Speaker 06

  Correct.

• 37:09Speaker 17

  The big advantage of Pinyin is that it more accurately reflects the actual Chinese pronunciation of a name or place.

• 37:15Speaker 06

  So for example, Beijing, B-E-I-J-I-N-G, is Pinyin for the two characters Bei and Jing.

• 37:25Speaker 06

  Now, pinyin had been around for a while, but in the 1980s, right around the time Professor Wang saved the Chinese character from the threat of computers, the Chinese government started to prioritize pinyin in the classroom.

• 37:39Speaker 09

  So that when a Chinese kindergartner begins developing literacy in reading and writing, they learn pinyin at the same time or even earlier than they start to learn Chinese characters.

• 37:52Speaker 06

  Really?

• 37:52Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 37:53Speaker 06

  And so these computer scientists, who had spent years trying to figure out how to visually relate Chinese characters to the letters on a keyboard.

• 38:02Speaker 09

  They think to themselves, basically, we have the Chinese educational system teaching a way of relating the Latin alphabet to Chinese characters.

• 38:10Speaker 06

  Right.

• 38:11Speaker 09

  So it would be kind of foolish not to exploit that.

• 38:14Speaker 06

  Like, we should start inputting characters by typing their sounds in pinyin. And now, of course, Professor Wang

• 38:23Speaker 06

  was staunchly opposed to this.

• 38:26Speaker 08

  When we use pinyin to type, we lose sight of the Chinese character's form. And the form is the soul of a character.

• 38:37Speaker 08

  It's like you're grabbing hold of a person and doing away with their flesh.

• 38:44Speaker 08

  You can't express the meaning of a Chinese character by its sound.

• 38:50Speaker 08

  And the more people use pinyin, the more skewed Chinese characters are.

• 38:55Speaker 06

  Nonetheless, beginning in the early 1990s,

• 38:58Speaker 09

  Chinese input moved to phonetic pinyin input.

• 39:02Speaker 06

  Replacing character shape systems like Professor Wang's.

• 39:07Speaker 08

  Actually, at the moment, I don't know if you can hear me clearly.

• 39:10Speaker 06

  I mean, to the point that, as Yang Yang told me, if you go into a Starbucks in China today, yes, people will be typing using different methods, but...

• 39:21Speaker 08

  Most chances are, they are typing with pinyin.

• 39:25Speaker 09

  Some sort of pinyin editor.

• 39:28Speaker 08

  And I mean, that's that's one of the things that actually saddens me after this interview. And because by all means, Professor Wang, he is right about it, that you do forget how to write Chinese if you are so used to typing in pinyin. And that happens to me. You know, it's it's throughout our interviews, you know, that lasted so long, I didn't have the heart to tell him that I couldn't type in wu bi, which just to confirm that young generation has no hope in preserving the Chinese culture anyhow.

• 40:09Speaker 06

  But even as young Chinese people, I don't know, as they sit down at their computers or stare down at their phones, are being drawn away from this long, rich history of Chinese characters and towards this pinyin phonetic future. The allure of speed and the search for the fastest way to type continues.

• 40:30Speaker 09

  Absolutely. The question still remains, what is the best, fastest way to do this?

• 40:37Speaker 06

  And so, what you have today in China

• 40:43Speaker 06

  are these typing competitions.

• 40:47Speaker 09

  Yeah, there are typing competitions in Chinese.

• 40:50Speaker 06

  Where these different methods and different typists face off.

• 40:55Speaker 06

  And these things are sort of a big deal.

• 40:57Speaker 09

  They take place at the local level, at the national level.

• 41:00Speaker 06

  They're sometimes even televised.

• 41:01Speaker 09

  In a certain sense, it's it's like America's got talent for input.

• 41:09Speaker 06

  This audio is from the finals of a competition back in 2016. Took place at China's esports hall in Beijing. And the broadcast opens with the audience looking down towards a young lady emcee

• 41:23Speaker 06

  who's standing in front of ten or so desks, each with a computer on them. And before the race can begin,

• 41:30Speaker 06

  she invites the contestants out to to stand with her on the front of the stage, this crew of lanky, glasses and t-shirt-wearing Han Chinese folks.

• 41:40Speaker 18

  我是大概零九年开始打的，到现在已经有差不多七年了。

• 41:44Speaker 19

  好。

• 41:45Speaker 06

  They introduce themselves one by one.

• 41:47Speaker 20

  我觉得能跟我们这团队

• 41:50Speaker 06

  And then also.

• 41:51Speaker 09

  This is, this is a little bit like sponsoring race car drivers for your, you know, for your brand.

• 41:56Speaker 06

  通过，首先是通过五笔论坛。 They declare which input method they'll be using. Because oftentimes, the folks who designed the input methods have actually hired and trained these super speedy typists to use their input method.

• 42:11Speaker 09

  Huh.

• 42:12Speaker 19

  那大家也可以看到，我现

• 42:13Speaker 06

  With the introductions done, the emcee sends the typists back to their keyboards, some of which are interestingly blank, like they have no script on them at all.

• 42:24Speaker 09

  And in essence, what happens is a text appears on the screen that no one in the competition has seen, the same text for everyone in the competition.

• 42:33Speaker 19

  我倒数计时三个数，大家准备好。

• 42:35Speaker 09

  And then.

• 42:36Speaker 19

  三二一。

• 42:38Speaker 09

  You know, the stopwatch starts.

• 42:40Speaker 19

  开始。

• 42:42Speaker 06

  And the race is on.

• 42:43Speaker 09

  Just like.

• 42:45Speaker 09

  I mean, they're just like, it's like unbelievable the speed at which they're going.

• 42:52Speaker 06

  The room is totally silent, other than the clacking of keys. The camera's cutting between contestants, capturing these over-the-shoulder shots of their screens just filling with text. And when they do linger on one typist's screen long enough,

• 43:11Speaker 06

  and really you'd need to almost go frame by frame to catch this. But what you see is, is a typist inputting a string of sort of nonsense letters, which prompts a little tiny box to pop up with five or so options,

• 43:28Speaker 06

  which they then select from with one final keystroke.

• 43:39Speaker 07

  How many like, uh, words, characters per minute can they type?

• 43:42Speaker 06

  Uh, 244.

• 43:44Speaker 07

  What?

• 43:44Speaker 06

  Was the winning. Yeah.

• 43:46Speaker 07

  That's insane. That's insane.

• 43:49Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 43:49Speaker 07

  I didn't understand. I did not understand, Simon. That's so fast. Oh my god.

• 43:57Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 43:57Speaker 07

  My dad, who's the fastest typist I know, he can only do like 80.

• 44:03Speaker 07

  That's, that's, that is, that's kinda wild.

• 44:11Speaker 06

  Well, and wilder still, uh, in this competition, the winning typist was using...

• 44:20Speaker 06

  Woobi.

• 44:23Speaker 07

  Really?

• 44:24Speaker 06

  Yes. The guy who typed 244 characters a minute, uh, was using Professor Wang's Woobi.

• 44:29Speaker 07

  Wow. Whoa.

• 44:31Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 44:31Speaker 07

  That's... So they're, they're, they're clobbering us for speed, but also able to do that in a way that preserves character writing?

• 44:39Speaker 06

  And, and this is not uncommon. Like, uh, oftentimes in these competitions, it's these older Woobi-like, uh, input methods that win.

• 44:48Speaker 09

  Ironically, by all accounts, their top speeds are faster than the top possible speeds of phonetic input.

• 44:56Speaker 07

  Wow. So wait, but then, if he's made this thing that is like so blazingly fast, and also is able to sort of preserve Chinese way of writing, goes back thousands of years, why is it that these other input methods, these phonetic-based methods, are winning in terms of usage?

• 45:15Speaker 06

  Right. Well, the reason there is, is pretty much, uh, the Chinese government.

• 45:19Speaker 09

  The Chinese state promote the idea of phonetic-based input systems, really for one major reason.

• 45:26Speaker 06

  One of the same reasons they prioritize teaching pinyin in, in school.

• 45:31Speaker 09

  The unification of the Chinese language.

• 45:34Speaker 06

  Because although when we think of the Chinese language, we think, oh, there's Mandarin and Cantonese. In reality, when it comes to speaking, there are dozens of different Chinese languages. Cantonese, Shanghainese, Fujianese. Languages that sound totally different, but on the page look the exact same because they're all using the same characters. Now, with a structure, shape-based input like Woobi, where you're describing what the character looks like, you can type and still maintain your spoken language.

• 46:07Speaker 09

  It doesn't care if you speak Cantonese or Fujianese or something or so forth because you're typing it based on what the character looks like, not how you pronounce it. But if you get people having to learn phonetic-based input systems, they have no choice, really, but to learn to type and speak the standard pronunciation of every character.

• 46:39Speaker 06

  And so now, in a sense, the ubiquity of the QWERTY keyboard is being deployed to erase difference and quiet dissent.

• 46:50Speaker 10

  简直是学法学修，一点不懂工程技术，这是个工程技术问题。

• 46:54Speaker 06

  Look no further than Woobi.

• 46:56Speaker 10

  仅仅是个文字学的问题。

• 46:57Speaker 08

  The very commission that was closed down by Woobi?

• 47:00Speaker 06

  The Commission on Language Reform.

• 47:02Speaker 10

  他们利用他们的学文科的。

• 47:04Speaker 08

  They came back to life.

• 47:05Speaker 10

  教全国所有的学校。

• 47:07Speaker 08

  And they kicked the Woobi method out of schools.

• 47:19Speaker 06

  And you can argue that which typing method you use, how you type, has a real impact that goes beyond the death of the Chinese character or beyond the government's desire for unification of the language, beyond China itself.

• 47:37Speaker 06

  And so let me, let me give you an admittedly small example of this. There's this aptly named thing called the QWERTY effect. Have you heard of the QWERTY effect?

• 47:47Speaker 07

  Go, go, go for it.

• 47:48Speaker 06

  So this is an English study. It was initially done here in the States in the early 2000s. They did a bunch of tests on people trying to find what, what feelings they associated with words. And what they found was that people like words that have more letters in them typed from the right hand of a QWERTY keyboard than not.

• 48:10Speaker 07

  No way.

• 48:11Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 48:12Speaker 07

  So the U's and the L's and the P's and the K's and the M's and the J's, those are having more positive associations than the Q, W's, X's, Z's, R's.

• 48:22Speaker 06

  Yeah. People like O more than they like E. This has been found in English, in Spanish, in German, and in Dutch, both for right-handed people and left-handed people.

• 48:32Speaker 07

  But couldn't that just be that the keyboard was designed so that the letters that we like happen to just be on the right side? Do you know what I mean? Like, is it a chicken or the egg type of situation?

• 48:42Speaker 06

  It likely is, is not that. It's likely not that, that those letters were intentionally placed there. And there are a variety of stories about how the layout of the QWERTY keyboard happened. But, but sort of one of the indisputed facts is if you look, if you look at the top row of your keyboard, QWERTY row, it has all of the letters of the word typewriter in it.

• 49:06Speaker 07

  T, what? P, E, R, I, T. Yeah.

• 49:09Speaker 06

  They're all there. The story goes that the reason it was laid out this way is because you had these salesmen who would show up and want to demo the product, demo this, this typewriter, but these guys didn't know how to type. So they put all the letters for typewriter on the top row so they could very quickly punch out the word typewriter in their demo.

• 49:27Speaker 07

  Oh, wow. So it's totally arbitrary? Like, did they didn't, it was, it was put in the order, it was put for reasons that have nothing to do with anything we're talking about?

• 49:36Speaker 06

  Yes, correct. And there is some evidence that the layout of the keyboard created those left-right preferences rather than the other way around. So just a couple of years ago, researchers asked, okay, has our feeling towards letters changed over time? And so what they did was they got social security records from the 1960s through 2012, and they looked at names of babies being born. And they decided, we're gonna pick 1990 as our year that the QWERTY keyboard became ubiquitous.

• 50:08Speaker 07

  Huh.

• 50:09Speaker 06

  And let's look at the prevalence of names with more right-handed letters than left before 1990 and after.

• 50:17Speaker 07

  Oh, my god.

• 50:18Speaker 06

  And it spikes after 1990.

• 50:20Speaker 07

  No way.

• 50:20Speaker 06

  It's crazy.

• 50:21Speaker 07

  So suddenly, a lot of Pauls and a lot of, like, Leas start to appear?

• 50:27Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 50:27Speaker 07

  That is bizarre.

• 50:29Speaker 06

  So like, Simon is four right-hand, one left-hand. Jad is one right-hand, two left-hand. So you and I bear out the idea.

• 50:39Speaker 07

  Yeah, you know, it's funny. It's like, there's, what, who is it? Was it Wittgenstein? I don't think it was Wittgenstein. Heidegger? Was it a Heidegger thing? Somebody, one of those nihilistic German philosophers had this idea that the hammer isn't just a tool. The hammer actually feeds back. The hammer changes the hand.

• 50:55Speaker 06

  Right.

• 50:56Speaker 07

  And it's interesting to me that this arbitrary, leftover, arguably outdated QWERTY keyboard that we're all stuck with is actually influencing our preferences when it comes to naming our offspring? I mean, who knows what else it's doing? It's probably doing all kinds of weird things to us. Wait, so do we know, sorry, just to get back on track, do we know?

• 51:19Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 51:20Speaker 07

  If this QWERTY naming thing is influencing the way Chinese people name their kids?

• 51:27Speaker 06

  Right. Well, so with the QWERTY effect in general, the lab that I spoke to looked into studying it in China. They had some Chinese grad students, actually, who wanted to see if it applied back in China. But in part, I think because there are so many different ways to type, they weren't methodologically able to figure out how to do it.

• 51:48Speaker 07

  Hmm.

• 51:49Speaker 06

  But I will say, the idea you bring out of, or you bring up of the hammer changing the hand. Like where Chinese typing is going, I think, is sort of the hammer changing the hand on steroids. What do you mean?

• 52:04Speaker 09

  Now, we've got this new phase of this era of input, which is cloud input.

• 52:11Speaker 06

  Typing that uses artificial intelligence.

• 52:14Speaker 09

  In the United States, I would say the way that people are most familiar with this is the Google search bar, that when you start to type, it will give you suggestions, not based on the absolute mathematical probability of the frequency of a word that you might be doing, but really what's hot in the news and what other people are searching for.

• 52:33Speaker 06

  However, in China, this goes way beyond search engine suggestions.

• 52:38Speaker 09

  In Microsoft Word, this is not a search field. This is like Microsoft Word. And you say, OK, in the news today, some star has done something terrible and fallen from grace. And so some input user is starting to enter the name of this befallen pop star. The system is smart enough to say, OK, this user has never entered this person's name before, but up in the cloud, millions of people are entering this particular person's name. Let's give this local user that suggestion, based upon what users elsewhere in the cloud are doing.

• 53:17Speaker 06

  And so with this cloud-based input, like, everything you write, every keystroke, every word is being, in some way, influenced by what everyone else is typing.

• 53:32Speaker 09

  It is totally unparalleled in the Western world. There is nothing even close to this. And in fact, now, arguably over the last two decades, there has been an inversion in which Chinese in the computational world is arguably the fastest language in the realm of typing.

• 53:55Speaker 06

  And so we're the ones now looking east, seeing these technologies and wondering, like, shit, how do we catch up? Like, in the course of 40 years, China, they've leapfrogged us.

• 54:10Speaker 07

  That's what it is. It feels like a crazy leapfrog. Yeah.

• 54:13Speaker 06

  But with this cloud input, there's also a question of, like, do we want to catch up to that?

• 54:19Speaker 09

  It's both invigorating, exciting, strange, and also eerie, and, you know, and post-futuristic. Because right now, it's guessing what the writer already wants to say. But what happens when the speed of suggestion outstrips the speed of thought and the speed of intention? And what it says is, you know, Simon, what if you did this? And you say, wow, actually, that's a really good suggestion. Thank you. Yes, I will do that. At that point, we have co-writing. And once we move, once we move into the stage of, further into the stage of suggested writing,

• 55:01Speaker 09

  then we're not, it's kind of like a writing partner that's giving you a good suggestion. But of course, it's a writing partner who's also the writing partner of thousands of other writers at that exact moment. And that is, from my standpoint, a pretty terrifying scenario.

• 55:23Speaker 06

  Well, right, because it's a writing partner with an agenda, potentially.

• 55:26Speaker 09

  Mm-hmm.

• 55:29Speaker 09

  It is a writing partner. I mean, and not perhaps. It has, there is agenda, absolutely.

• 55:41Speaker 09

  I bet you will never type quite the same way again, Jed Applerod.

• 55:45Speaker 07

  No, I definitely am looking at my QWERTY right now, and I'm very, I don't trust you.

• 55:52Speaker 07

  Got my eye on you, QWERTY.

• 55:53Speaker 09

  It's watching you, too.

• 55:56Speaker 07

  Here's, apparently.

• 56:05Speaker 07

  Producer Simon Adler. The story was reported and produced by Simon with reporting assistance by Young Young. Original music throughout the piece by Simon. Special thanks again to Young Young. Without her, the story would not have happened. Also to Tom Mulaney for his years of research on this topic and for sending us down this path to begin with. And to Daniel Casasanto for teaching us about the Courtney Effect. Joshua Suter, Marion Renaud, David Mosher, Chen Gao, Ray Uncle Chang, Martian Wickery, and Ying Ying Liu. I'm Jad Abumrad. Thanks for listening.

• 56:43Speaker 21

  Hi, I'm Hafiz and I'm from Toronto. Here are the staff credits. Radiolab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Lethe F. Nasr. Soren Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandback is our executive director. Our managing editor is Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry Fertuna, David Gabel, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sinjun Nam-Samban-Dam, Matt Keelty, Mona Madhavkar, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Kari, Anissa Vizza, Ariane Whack, Molly Webster, and Jessica Yeh, with help from Rebecca Rand. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Anna Pujo Mazzini, and Natalie Middles.

• 57:27Speaker 22

  Hi, I'm Jerry and I'm calling from Kafstewar, Kenya. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.