The Wubi Effect

Summary

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Radiolab: "The Wubi Effect"

Date: November 7, 2025
Host: Jad Abumrad, with reporting by Simon Adler
Theme: How the challenge of typing Chinese on computers shaped technology, language, and even the global AI race.

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the fascinating, high-stakes race to bring the Chinese language into the computer age—a challenge so daunting it nearly led to the abandonment of thousands of years of Chinese writing. At its heart is the invention of the Wubi input method by Professor Wang Yongmin, an innovation that preserved the Chinese character and reshaped global technological development. The episode weaves together cultural, linguistic, and technological history, ultimately raising deep questions about how the tools we use change us and our languages.

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Key Discussion Points

1. The Technological "Arms Race" and Its Roots (00:22–03:16)

• The episode opens with the contemporary "AI arms race" between the US and China.
• Host Latif Nasser connects this to a previous technological competition over language and computers in the 1970s and 80s.
• Simon Adler and Jad Abumrad set up a cross-cultural comparison: in both US and Chinese coffee shops, people use QWERTY keyboards, but type Chinese in countless different ways.

Notable Quote:
"If everybody in this Chinese Starbucks was really into dogs...no two people would be typing the word dog the same way."
— Simon Adler (03:38)

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2. The Problem: Computing Clashes with Chinese Script (05:01–15:17)

• Professor Tom Mullaney (Stanford) explains: the Chinese writing system had up to 70,000 unique characters, impossible to fit on or display with 1970s Western computer hardware.
• Computer memory and even dot-matrix printers physically couldn't handle the complexity or size of the Chinese script.
• Hardware and software bias for English (or Latin alphabets) made China an outsider in the coming computer revolution.

Notable Moment:
"There was a saying that computers are the grave diggers of Chinese characters."
— Professor Wang (14:45)

• Some advocated abandoning the script for alphabetization or using Esperanto/English to keep pace technologically.

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3. The Hero: Professor Wang and the Wubi Method (16:25–31:32)

• Professor Wang Yongmin is likened to "the Chinese Steve Jobs."
• Through painstaking effort—breaking characters down into component shapes or "atoms," thousands of handmade note cards, years of analysis—Wang creates the "periodic table" of Chinese components (down to 125 from 120,000 parts).
• His system (Wubi) allows users to efficiently input Chinese characters on a standard QWERTY keyboard by their shape, not sound.
• Debuts Wubi at the United Nations (28:01), stunning audiences.
• The government halts efforts to abolish Chinese characters; using Wubi becomes synonymous with computer literacy in China.

Notable Quotes:
"When we use Pinyin to type, we lose sight of the Chinese character's form. And the form is the soul of a character."
— Professor Wang (43:11)

"He had saved thousands of years of the Chinese language and given it a place in the modern world."
— Simon Adler (31:05)

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4. The Explosion: Competing Input Methods and the Rise of Pinyin (36:24–44:54)

• Wubi sparks a technological explosion—over a thousand different Chinese input methods are developed, each with unique systems (breaking characters by shape, by sound, by visual resemblance to English letters, or numeric codes).

• The government begins promoting Pinyin—a system using the Latin alphabet to represent Chinese sounds—especially in education, for linguistic unification.

• Predictive text and autocompletion originated in Chinese computing decades before they emerged in the English world.

Notable Quote:
"Both predictive text and autocompletion were anticipated in Chinese information technology decades before they were in English language computing."
— Tom Mullaney (40:09)

• The "battle" over input methods includes heated disputes and even typing competitions.

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5. The Trade-off: Speed vs. Cultural Preservation (45:15–51:46)

• National typing competitions pit input methods and users against each other; Wubi regularly outperforms phonetic (Pinyin) systems in speed.

• Ironically, despite Wubi's speed and preservation of character writing, its use wanes due to state-sponsored promotion of Pinyin for standardization and unity.

• Shape-based input lets users retain their native dialects; phonetic input incentivizes Mandarin and suppresses dialectal diversity.

Memorable Moment:
"The allure of speed and the search for the fastest way to type continues...What is the best, fastest way to do this?"
— Simon Adler and Tom Mullaney (45:15)

---

6. The QWERTY Effect and Feedback Loop (52:05–56:49)

• The "QWERTY Effect": The arbitrary layout of the keyboard actually affects how people feel about words, even influencing baby names in the US ("names with more right-handed letters spiked after 1990").
• Philosophical reflection: Technology (like the keyboard) not only facilitates communication, but subtly shapes language, thought, and culture.

Notable Exchange:
"Who knows what else it's doing? It's probably doing all kinds of weird things to us. Wait, do we know...if this QWERTY naming thing is influencing the way Chinese people name their kids?"
— Jad Abumrad (55:14)
"I think...because there are so many different ways to type, they weren't methodologically able to figure out how to do it."
— Simon Adler (56:12)

---

7. The Future: Cloud Input and AI as Writing Partner (56:49–end)

• Chinese input is now rapidly advancing in "cloud input"—AI suggestions as you type, not just in search but in word processors—based on what millions of others are writing in real time.
• Raises eeriness and ethical questions: What happens when the machine suggests what to say at the speed of thought? What happens to individuality and dissent?

Notable Quote:
"What happens when the speed of suggestion outstrips the speed of thought and intention? And what it says is, ‘Simon, what if you did this...?’ At that point, we have co-writing...but 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."
— Tom Mullaney (59:04–60:08)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments with Timestamps

• "Computers are the grave diggers of Chinese characters." — Professor Wang (14:45)
• "It's just your keyboard. It's the same keyboard." — Professor Wang, after stunning UN officials with Wubi (28:43)
• "When we use Pinyin to type, we lose sight of the Chinese character's form. And the form is the soul of a character." — Professor Wang (43:11)
• "Speed of suggestion outstrips the speed of thought and intention...a writing partner who’s also the partner of thousands of others...a pretty terrifying scenario." — Tom Mullaney (59:04–60:08)
• "Who knows what else it's doing? It's probably doing all kinds of weird things to us." — Jad Abumrad (55:14)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Time | Segment | |------|---------| | 00:22–03:16 | Intro & framing: the technological race, QWERTY keyboard differences | | 05:01–15:17 | The Chinese language problem and existential threats | | 16:25–31:32 | Professor Wang’s backstory and the Wubi breakthrough | | 36:24–44:54 | Competing input methods, rise of Pinyin, predictive text in China | | 45:15–51:46 | Typing competitions, trade-offs between input methods, political drivers | | 52:05–56:49 | The subtle power of tools: QWERTY Effect and linguistic feedback loops | | 56:49–end | Cloud input, AI writing partners, open questions about autonomy and influence |

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Tone & Language

The episode strikes a playful, accessible tone but is deeply thoughtful—mixing wonder, humor, and philosophical reflection. Jad Abumrad, Simon Adler, and guests bring out the surprising human drama behind what might seem a technical topic, making profound ideas vivid and approachable.

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Takeaways

• The struggle to make Chinese type-able on computers was an existential crisis for Chinese culture—a technical solution (Wubi) arguably saved the writing system.
• Input methods both arise from and shape education, language, politics, and identity.
• The subtle biases of technology (whether QWERTY layout or cloud-powered AI) can deeply and unexpectedly reshape culture, even at the level of personal names and thought itself.
• China, once technologically behind, now leads in some areas, blurring the boundary between user and machine, raising urgent questions for the future of language, individuality, and AI.

---

A fascinating episode for anyone curious about the crossroads of technology, culture, and human ingenuity.

Transcript

[AT&T Sponsor]

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[Latif Nasser]

Radiolab is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try [e-mail] Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states. 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.

[Tom Mullaney]

We are in this high tech competition.

[Simon Adler]

With China over AI AI arms race.

[Molly Webster]

The country that leads in technology tends to lead the world.

[Simon Adler]

We need to win the race here in the United States.

[Latif Nasser]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

Wait, you're listening. Okay.

[Martin Howard]

All right.

[Professor Wang]

Okay.

[Ira Glass]

All right.

[Simon Adler]

You're listening to Radiolab Radio from wny. Rewind.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. This is Radiolab. To start things off today, couple months ago. You want some coffee? Too small.

[Simon Adler]

I'm gonna get an Americana.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Simon Adler]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Simon Adler]

So let's gaze out upon the hipsters.

[Jad Abumrad]

Of lower Manhattan, survey and count the number of laptops yeah.

[Simon Adler]

So how many laptops do you think are in here?

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay, starting from the left, we're going to circle around. We got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Two more on the board, two more on the mart.

[Simon Adler]

And they're all typing the same way, right? They're all using a QWERTY keyboard, yeah. Yes.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Simon Adler]

Now, let's imagine we're in Shenzhen in a Chinese Starbucks, was to point out.

[Jad Abumrad]

A massive cultural difference hidden in plain sight, and to propose a bit of a reporting trip. Are you going to send somebody to Starbucks in Shenzhen?

[Simon Adler]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

Well played, Adler.

[Simon Adler]

Now, you did not bite on that reporting trip.

[Jad Abumrad]

Nope.

[Simon Adler]

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

[Professor Wang]

So, okay, I'm in this big Starbucks shop here in Hong Kong to play.

[Simon Adler]

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

[Professor Wang]

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

[Simon Adler]

And here is where we get to the point. Everyone in this Starbucks, you know, typing.

[Professor Wang]

And writing and browsing on the Internet.

[Simon Adler]

Were all using their keyboards in a different way.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Simon Adler]

Going to be the exact same thing. They're QWERTY keyboards, just like here in New York.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, okay. I didn't know that.

[Simon Adler]

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 go, which is dog in Mandarin. No two people would be typing the word dog the same way.

[Tom Mullaney]

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

[Simon Adler]

This is Professor Tom Mulaney.

[Tom Mullaney]

I'm professor of Chinese history at Stanford University.

[Simon Adler]

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

[Tom Mullaney]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Simon Adler]

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

[Tom Mullaney]

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

[Simon Adler]

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 heading. All Right. 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.

[Latif Nasser]

Hello.

[Professor Wang]

Hello, Simon.

[Molly Webster]

Hi.

[Simon Adler]

Hello. Is everybody here? Can you all hear us? Professor Wongyong.

[Professor Wang]

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

[Simon Adler]

My interpreter, fixer, and really co reporter on the China side of this. Yang Yang and I spoke with him a couple 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?

[Professor Wang]

He says that he is nowhere close to the wealth Steve Jobs held. A famous man, but in terms of his fame and reputation, yes, it's a fair comparison.

[Simon Adler]

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

[Professor Wang]

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

[Simon Adler]

His family farmed, and his dad was also a carpenter. But it was a hard scrabble ex.

[Professor Wang]

Was so poor that they couldn't afford any clothes for him. And, you know, because they were dirt poor. He understood at a very young age that going to school was not a small thing. So he studied extremely hard. He said that from the first grade all the way to university.

[Latif Nasser]

Always the number one.

[Professor Wang]

Okay, I am always the number one.

[Simon Adler]

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.

[Professor Wang]

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

[Simon Adler]

And this wasn't just any research institute.

[Professor Wang]

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

[Simon Adler]

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

[Tom Mullaney]

1970S, and everyone that was paying attention knew that computing was going to change the fabric of economy warfare again.

[Simon Adler]

Historian Tom Mullaney.

[Tom Mullaney]

Communication, everything.

[Professor Wang]

At that time, China was just starting to enter this field and was lagging behind.

[Simon Adler]

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.

[Tom Mullaney]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

Meaning what?

[Simon Adler]

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

[AT&T Sponsor]

Say them with me.

[Simon Adler]

A, B, C. Each one representing a sound in the word F. And the writing, in fact, tells you how to.

[Professor Wang]

Say the word B I G, big.

[Simon Adler]

Well, Chinese writing is completely different. The person character is placed next to a tree to convey the idea of resting. 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. Three trees here are combined in the character for to mean a forest. 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 Wong's home province. And this writing system, these characters grew out of an attempt to represent the actual things in the world, world around us. Water, stars, animals, actions, feelings.

[Professor Wang]

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

[Simon Adler]

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.

[Tom Mullaney]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Huh.

[Simon Adler]

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?

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, I remember. Yeah.

[Simon Adler]

Okay.

[Tom Mullaney]

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

[Simon Adler]

Paper pixels.

[Tom Mullaney]

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

[Simon Adler]

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

[Tom Mullaney]

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 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Whoa, that's funny. Like, I've. 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.

[Simon Adler]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

No.

[Tom Mullaney]

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

[Simon Adler]

So this was the problem they were trying to solve at that top secret research institute. And the full magnitude of it, of this problem, really smacked Professor Wong in the face when he saw his first fully formed Western computer, which amazingly, because he'd been focused on such hyper specific electrical problems, didn't happen until about eight years into his research. He remembers seeing it in a local.

[Professor Wang]

Printing shop, the first ever in real life. He was totally amazed. Yeah, I mean, that was incredible.

[Simon Adler]

But then he says he looked down at the keyboard attached to the computer and saw the Latin letters. And he thought, 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?

[Tom Mullaney]

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

[Simon Adler]

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

[Professor Wang]

At that time, there was a saying that computers are the grave diggers of Chinese characters.

[Jad Abumrad]

Gravediggers.

[Tom Mullaney]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

You mean like throw out Chinese characters altogether?

[Professor Wang]

Yeah, it was like a doom day.

[Jad Abumrad]

Because of this very thing.

[Simon Adler]

It was a big part of it. And so tons of folks in the field of computing were arguing, we've got.

[Tom Mullaney]

To replace Chinese with Esperanto or with English or with something else so that we can participate in global modernity.

[Simon Adler]

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.

[Professor Wang]

Wang wasn't convinced.

[Simon Adler]

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

[Professor Wang]

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

[Simon Adler]

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

[Professor Wang]

Chinese culture would be over with it too, 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.

[Molly Webster]

Whoa.

[Simon Adler]

So dramatic. It's so dramatic.

[Professor Wang]

But it was really pressing for him.

[Simon Adler]

Yeah, and for good reason.

[Professor Wang]

I.

[Simon Adler]

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

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[Ira Glass]

This is Ira Glass, the host of this American Life. So much is changing so rapidly right now with President Trump in office. It feels good to pause for a moment sometimes and look around at what's what to try and do that. We've been finding these incredible stories about right now that are funny and have feeling, and you get to see people everywhere and adapting and making sense of this new America that we find ourselves in. If you haven't listened in a while, I honestly think these are some of the best stories we've ever done. This is American Life every week, wherever you get your podcasts.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Simon Adler]

And I'm Simon Adler.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Simon Adler]

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.

[Martin Howard]

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

[Simon Adler]

Historian and collector Martin Howard.

[Martin Howard]

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. Okay, he'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.

[Simon Adler]

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

[Martin Howard]

SIMON it was a revolutionary machine, a paradigm shift.

[Jad Abumrad]

Typewriter speed queens are lined up to.

[Simon Adler]

Show the world how fast they are for three basic reasons.

[Martin Howard]

Number one, then there are speed tap.

[Simon Adler]

Tappers setting the keyboards on fire.

[Martin Howard]

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

[Simon Adler]

149 words a minute.

[Martin Howard]

Number two, you know what it's like reading other people's handwriting. Some people's handwriting is goddamn awful.

[Simon Adler]

Legibility, awful to read.

[Martin Howard]

It's a tremendous step forward in business efficiency. The third reason, making copies. 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.

[Simon Adler]

I think so.

[Martin Howard]

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

[Simon Adler]

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

[Tom Mullaney]

We have to have these machines.

[Simon Adler]

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

[Tom Mullaney]

We'Ve got to get rid of Chinese.

[Simon Adler]

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.

[Tom Mullaney]

Yeah, he was one of the chorus.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Simon Adler]

Exactly.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay.

[Simon Adler]

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 untypewriter y it is.

[Tom Mullaney]

This is a typewriter with no keyboard.

[Simon Adler]

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, and then.

[Tom Mullaney]

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.

[Simon Adler]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Simon Adler]

Exactly. And on its way up, rubs against.

[Tom Mullaney]

A ink spool and then strikes the paper, printing the character onto the page before finally the arm swings back down and the force of it doing so.

[Simon Adler]

Spits that metal character back into the tray bed.

[Jad Abumrad]

Dang.

[Simon Adler]

And while you could only type about half as fast on one of these as you could on a qwerty English typewriter. I mean, it worked. It was enough to stave off the death of the character. And for Professor Wang, 50 years later, it was a sign. 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. And so to do that, he actually started by breaking down the Chinese characters themselves.

[Tom Mullaney]

Because 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.

[Professor Wang]

Just imagine this is chemistry. There are tens of thousands of molecules in chemistry, but there were are only 100 or so atoms.

[Simon Adler]

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

[Tom Mullaney]

The components of characters like a shape Alphabet.

[Simon Adler]

That he could put those on the keyboard and that.

[Tom Mullaney]

People could then spell Chinese characters not by sound, but by shape.

[Simon Adler]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Got it.

[Simon Adler]

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. Huh.

[Jad Abumrad]

So work plus water equals river.

[Simon Adler]

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, is what Professor Wong 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.

[Professor Wang]

Yeah, note cards.

[Simon Adler]

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

[Professor Wang]

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

[Simon Adler]

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. And two more from sweat and juice. 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 regrouped. He piled the new common components, and.

[Professor Wang]

He did this again, boiling down lower.

[Simon Adler]

And again and lower and again and again lower and lower. Re. Stacking pieces of paper.

[Professor Wang]

Yeah, just passing cards.

[Simon Adler]

Wow. Professor Huang did this for five years until he had it down to 125 components. The periodic table of Chinese, as he referred to it.

[Jad Abumrad]

And then how would you type with this periodic table?

[Simon Adler]

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 three, two, three. Well, just like that, Professor Wong 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, the computer would sum them up for you and generate it on the screen. He named his creation the Wooby Method.

[Professor Wang]

And described WUBI as a sacred invention.

[Simon Adler]

All he had to do now was convince the rest of the world. He got that opportunity in 1984.

[Martin Howard]

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

[Professor Wang]

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

[Simon Adler]

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, the Deputy secretary, who was standing over his shoulder watching, astonished to.

[Professor Wang]

See Chinese characters rapidly appearing on the screen.

[Simon Adler]

In fact, she was incredulous.

[Professor Wang]

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

[Simon Adler]

They asked him to stand up and step away from the computer, and they flipped the keyboard, looking for some hidden piece of hardware.

[Professor Wang]

And at that time, Wong replied, what? You know what?

[Latif Nasser]

It's just your keyboard.

[Professor Wang]

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

[Simon Adler]

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

[Professor Wang]

China's National Day, he was chosen as the head of ceremonies of Henan Province.

[Simon Adler]

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

[Professor Wang]

Totally, totally, yeah.

[Simon Adler]

And then that same year, his crowning achievement, dramatic political and economic changes are taking place in the world's most populous country.

[Professor Wang]

April 4, 1984, a new leader, Hu Yaobang. Hu Yaobang, the head of the Communist Party, came to visit Professor Wan.

[Simon Adler]

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

[Professor Wang]

After Wang explained his invention, Hu Yaoban stood up and asked Comrade Yongming, do we still need to forsake Chinese characters? And Wang replied, no, no, Chinese characters don't need to be replaced. They can be efficiently input, just like English.

[Simon Adler]

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

[Professor Wang]

The State Commission for Language Reform, that.

[Simon Adler]

Government body looking into how to do.

[Professor Wang]

Away with the Chinese character, was closed, shut down.

[Simon Adler]

In no small part because of Wang's.

[Professor Wang]

Invention, companies were using woobi, students were taught to use woobi. Learning woobi became synonymous with learning how to use the computer.

[Simon Adler]

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.

[Tom Mullaney]

Concerned, to be this person was to be placed alongside, I don't know, Ford.

[Simon Adler]

Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, perhaps.

[Tom Mullaney]

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

[Simon Adler]

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

[Professor Wang]

He was. Or he thought he was. The battle hasn't finished.

[Simon Adler]

In fact, it was only beginning.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[AT&T Sponsor]

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[Latif Nasser]

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[Molly Webster]

Hey, I'm Molly Webster and this is an ad by BetterHelp. So it happens every year. The seasons are changing, the days are getting shorter, and basically once it becomes dark outside of my window, I feel like the rest of the world disappears and I'm alone and there's nothing left to do but watch television. This November, Better Help is asking everyone to reach out to our people. That could be your family, your friends, your neighbors, and to resist this call of the cocoon. And yeah, reaching out can take some courage. I've got text messages from January I haven't responded to and you know what? I'm gonna write them back right now. Hi, sorry I've been missing. How are you? Why don't we all do this sooner? Therapy is the same. BetterHelp makes it easier to take that first step. You just fill out a short questionnaire and they find a licensed therapist who they think you'll like. Our listeners get 10% off their first [e-mail] Radiolab that's betterhelp.com Radiolab.

[Ira Glass]

This is Ira Glass, the host of this American Life. So much is changing so rapidly right now with President Trump in office. It feels good to pause for a moment sometimes and look around at what's what to try and do that. We've been finding these incredible stories about right now that are funny and have feeling, and you get to see people everywhere adapting and making sense of this new America that we find ourselves in. If you haven't listened in a while, I honestly think these are some of the best stories we've ever done. This is American Life every week, wherever you get your podcasts.

[Jad Abumrad]

Jad, Radiolab. Back to producer Simon Adler.

[Simon Adler]

So before the break, Professor Wong 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Simon Adler]

So, first of all, while Professor Huang 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.

[Tom Mullaney]

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.

[Simon Adler]

Again, historian Tom Mullaney.

[Tom Mullaney]

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.

[Simon Adler]

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

[Tom Mullaney]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, you mean beyond Woobi?

[Simon Adler]

Oh, yes.

[Martin Howard]

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

[Simon Adler]

This is Zhou Ming, computer scientists in Microsoft Research Asia. And he was really on the front line of this development immediately. There are over 1000 methods developed and put into gills. So just a couple of quick examples here. Some of these broke the characters into components that looked like English letters.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Simon Adler]

Exactly. And then place those components on their English lookalike key. So A represented a sort of mountain peak looking component. 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, some.

[Tom Mullaney]

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

[Simon Adler]

You know that square number pad on the right side of most keyboards, in essence, every character was given its own numeric code that you would tap in there. 4,000, 303, dog, 9,080, fire, four, zero. Almost like a clerk ringing up vegetables at a grocery store checkout. And we're just scratching the surface here.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Simon Adler]

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

[Tom Mullaney]

Yeah.

[Martin Howard]

People are actually fighting each other.

[Simon Adler]

Oh, really? Really. For example, Ming says at one conference he attended, someone actually had to be thrown out. Yeah. Because of a fight.

[Martin Howard]

This kind of thing happens.

[Simon Adler]

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

[Tom Mullaney]

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.

[Simon Adler]

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.

[Tom Mullaney]

Both predictive text and autocompletion 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.

[Simon Adler]

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

[Tom Mullaney]

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

[Simon Adler]

But then even that wasn't fast enough.

[Tom Mullaney]

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

[Simon Adler]

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.

[Tom Mullaney]

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.

[Simon Adler]

Suggestion, and keep in mind, this was 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, the Chinese language itself changed.

[Tom Mullaney]

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

[Simon Adler]

Pinyin, it's called China went all in on pinyin.

[Jad Abumrad]

Pinyin.

[Simon Adler]

Pinyin.

[Tom Mullaney]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

Interesting. So it's an oral.

[Simon Adler]

Oral. Oral, yes.

[Jad Abumrad]

Au.

[Simon Adler]

Au.

[Jad Abumrad]

It's an oral translation.

[Simon Adler]

Correct.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Simon Adler]

So, for example, Beijing B e I J I n G is Pinyin for the two characters baiyi and jing. 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.

[Tom Mullaney]

The classroom 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.

[Latif Nasser]

Really?

[Tom Mullaney]

Yeah.

[Simon Adler]

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, they think to.

[Tom Mullaney]

Themselves, basically, we have the Chinese educational system teaching a way of relating the Latin Alphabet to Chinese characters.

[Simon Adler]

Right.

[Tom Mullaney]

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

[Simon Adler]

Like, we should start inputting characters by typing their sounds in Pinyin. And now, of course, Professor Wong was staunchly opposed to this.

[Professor Wang]

When we use Pinyin to type, we lose sight of the Chinese character's form. And the form is the soul of a character. It's like you're grabbing hold of a person and doing away with their flesh.

[Simon Adler]

Your faith was.

[Professor Wang]

You can't express the meaning of a Chinese character by its sound. And the more people use Pinyin, the more skewed Chinese characters are.

[Simon Adler]

Nonetheless, beginning in the early 1990s, Chinese.

[Tom Mullaney]

Input moved to phonetic Pinyin input, replacing.

[Simon Adler]

Character shape systems like Professor Wong's.

[Professor Wang]

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

[Simon Adler]

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.

[Professor Wang]

But most chances are they are typing with Pinyin.

[Simon Adler]

Some sort of Pinyin editor.

[Professor Wang]

Yeah. 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, throughout our interviews, you know, that lasted so long, I didn't have the heart to tell him that I couldn't type in ubi, which just to confirm that young generation has no hope in preserving the Chinese culture anyhow.

[Simon Adler]

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.

[Tom Mullaney]

Absolutely.

[Simon Adler]

The.

[Tom Mullaney]

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

[Simon Adler]

And so what you have today in China are these typing competitions.

[Tom Mullaney]

Yeah, there are typing competitions in Chinese.

[Simon Adler]

Where these different methods and different typists face off. And these things are sort of a big.

[Tom Mullaney]

They take place at the local level.

[Simon Adler]

At the national level, they're sometimes even televised.

[Tom Mullaney]

In a certain sense, it's like America's Got Talent for input.

[Simon Adler]

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 MC standing in front of 10 or so desks, each with a computer on them. And before the race can begin, she invites the contestants out to stand with her on the front of the stage. This crew of lanky glasses and T shirt wearing Han Chinese folks, they introduce themselves one by one. And then also this is.

[Tom Mullaney]

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

[Simon Adler]

They declare which input method they'll be using because ofttimes, the folks who designed the input methods have actually hired and trained these super speedy typists to use their input method.

[Jad Abumrad]

Huh?

[Simon Adler]

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

[Tom Mullaney]

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. And then, you know, the stopwatch starts.

[Simon Adler]

And the race is off just like.

[Tom Mullaney]

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

[Simon Adler]

The room is totally silent other than the clacking of keys, the cameras 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 and really, you'd need to almost go frame by frame to catch this. But what you see 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, which they then select from with one final keystroke.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Simon Adler]

244. What was the winning? Yeah, that's insane.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's insane.

[Simon Adler]

Yeah, I didn't understand.

[Jad Abumrad]

I did not understand. Simon, that's so fast. Oh my God. Yeah, my dad, who's the fastest typist I know, he, he can only do like 80. That's, that's, that is, that's kind of wild.

[Simon Adler]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

Really?

[Simon Adler]

Yes. The guy who typed 244 characters a minute was using Professor Wong's wooby. Wow.

[Molly Webster]

Whoa.

[Simon Adler]

Yeah, that's.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Simon Adler]

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

[Tom Mullaney]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

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?

[Simon Adler]

Right. Well, the reason there is pretty much.

[Tom Mullaney]

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

[Simon Adler]

The same reasons they prioritize teaching pinyin.

[Tom Mullaney]

In school, the unification of the Chinese language.

[Simon Adler]

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 wooby, where you're describing what the character looks like, you can type and still maintain your spoken language.

[Tom Mullaney]

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.

[Simon Adler]

And so now, in a sense, the ubiquity of the QWERTY keyboard is being deployed to, to erase difference and quiet dissent. Look no further than woobi, the very.

[Professor Wang]

Commission that was closed down by woobi.

[Simon Adler]

The Commission on Language Reform.

[Professor Wang]

They came back to life and they kicked the UBI master out of schools.

[Simon Adler]

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. And so 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?

[Jad Abumrad]

Go for it.

[Simon Adler]

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 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

No way.

[Simon Adler]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

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, Zs, R's.

[Simon Adler]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

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?

[Simon Adler]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

T, Y, P, E, R, I, T.

[Simon Adler]

Yeah, 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 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.

[Latif Nasser]

Oh, wow.

[Jad Abumrad]

So it's totally arbitrary. Like they didn't. It was put in the order. It was put for reasons that have nothing to do with anything. We're talking about yes, correct.

[Simon Adler]

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. Huh. And let's look at the prevalence of names with more right handed letters than left before 1990 and after. And it spikes after 1990. It's crazy.

[Jad Abumrad]

So suddenly a lot of Pauls and a lot of like Leahs start to appear.

[Simon Adler]

Yep.

[Jad Abumrad]

That is bizarre.

[Simon Adler]

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.

[Professor Wang]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

You know, it's funny, it's like there's. Who is it? Was it Wittgenstein? I don't think it was Wittgenstein. Heidegger. Was it a Heidegger thing? Somebody, one of those, like 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. Right. 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, do we know? Sorry, just to get back on track, do we know if this QWERTY naming thing is influencing the way Chinese people name their kids?

[Simon Adler]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

What do you mean?

[Tom Mullaney]

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

[Simon Adler]

Input typing that uses artificial intelligence in.

[Tom Mullaney]

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.

[Simon Adler]

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

[Tom Mullaney]

In Microsoft Word, this is not a search field, this is like Microsoft Word. And you say, okay, 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, okay, 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.

[Simon Adler]

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

[Tom Mullaney]

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.

[Simon Adler]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Latif Nasser]

Yeah.

[Simon Adler]

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

[Tom Mullaney]

It's both invigorating, exciting, strange, and also eerie 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, then 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.

[Simon Adler]

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

[Tom Mullaney]

Mm. It is a writing partner. I mean, and not. Not perhaps it has it. There is agenda. Absolutely.

[Simon Adler]

I bet you will never type quite the same way again. Jet. Appumrod.

[Jad Abumrad]

No, I definitely am looking at my qwerty right now and I'm very I don't trust you. Got my eye on you, Qwerty.

[Simon Adler]

It's watching you too.

[Jad Abumrad]

Here's Zach, apparently 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 Mullaney 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 Qwerty effect. Joshua Suter, Marion Renaud, David Mosier, Chen Gao, Briankle Chang, Martian Wickery and Yingying Lu. I'm Jad Abumrad. Thanks for listening.

[Simon Adler]

Hi, I'm Hafeez and I'm from Toronto. Here are the staff credits. Radiolab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser. Soren Wheeler is our Executive editor. Sarah Sandbach is our Executive Director. Our Managing editor is Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our Director of Sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Blume, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sinju, Nanam Sumbandam, Matt Keelty, Mona Madhulkar, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Kari, Anissa Vitza, Arianne Wack, Molly Webster and Jessica Yup, with help from Rebecca Rand. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Anna Pujol Mazzini, and Natalie Middleton. Hi, I'm Jerry and I'm calling from Kafsoar, Kenya. Leadership support for Radiolab 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. Tis the season of gifting and holes to Deck and the who's in Whoville were in love with new tech. Where can we find Sonos and Samsung and Nintendo? They shouted. Would they find it in one place? This they questioned and doubted when suddenly a who yelled, Walmart's the place to start. And each who added headphones, TVs and games to their carts. With Walmart, their shopping was done in a flurry. They cried out, who knew? And ordered their gifts in a hurry. Shop the latest tech gifts in the Walmart app.

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