How China Conquered The Keyboard
[Music] how on earth did a language with tens of thousands of characters fit onto this keyboard here is a world of communication tailored for your needs of today and tomorrow what really accounts for china's meteoric rise as a major global power this is shenzhen it's a city in the south of china i've actually been there but back in the 1980s this was just a sleepy fishing village with less than like 100 000 people today it is home to 12.5 million people it's a giant metropolis with huge buildings and home to some of the largest tech companies on the planet this city is emblematic of china's technological rise over the last 40 years it's an explosion in technology and development that has really never happened before in human history from an agrarian society to a technological powerhouse in just a couple of decades that's vast this almost didn't happen china almost didn't become the technological powerhouse and what held them back is something i have thought about a lot which is this keyboard this keyboard has like 80 or so keys and the chinese language has like tens of thousands of characters so how did they fit their language onto this keyboard to answer that question you have to dive deep into modern china into chairman mao into the divide between taiwan and mainland china who despite speaking the same language use very different typing methods all because of geopolitics it's a story of how china took a keyboard that was developed for a vastly different language system and mastered it mastered it better than we did here in the west it's a fascinating story of culture and history and technology and i want to share with you here is china has become a keystone of national economic policy a large part of china's population lives in large cities i really don't quite understand everything that's happening here [Music] to understand how chinese speakers type on a keyboard like this i talked to my friend mangle who currently is in quarantine in taiwan i just came back and currently in taiwan's currency hotel oh my gosh wow mangle has lived in both china and taiwan he's technologically savvy and he helped me understand how people type not just on the keyboard but on their phone yeah so basically growing up as a chinese or taiwanese you have to learn uh how to like write all the characters that's kind of the thing you do first and then you learn like the pronunciation system behind all the characters and in china that's pinging and then in taiwan let's do it so let's break this down most languages are written with an alphabet each letter in that alphabet represents a sound and when you string those sounds together you make a word it seems so intuitive as if like this is the only way to do it but in chinese there is another way chinese uses complex characters for each word so every word is a character each one of these characters represents a different thing an object a feeling a concept a verb all in all there are upwards of 70 or 80 000 of these characters this system was just fine it worked in china for a really long time because you could use a brush or a pen to write stuff out i like that it's like if it ain't broke don't fix it this is the qwerty keyboard it's called the qwerty keyboard because i mean just look at it this is the mechanism through which people not just communicate with each other but code the world the software and the programs that we all use all the time when this started to take over china had a real problem listen i need to just pause to tell you about something which is that investing money is hard sometimes and honestly i'm like in my 30s now and i'm like just sort of learning the art of investing and not really the sponsor of today's video it's a company called acorns what they do is they allow you to get started with investing with really small amounts of money to begin with and they make it so that you can take your spare change from any transaction and automatically invest it in the background so 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software and soon more and more computers were showing up into american homes the commodore 64 now in a home family pack meanwhile on the other side of the planet china a country of almost a billion people only had 3 000 computers in the entire country they were so far behind the west when it came to computer literacy the chinese government begins to freak out and is like guys we're getting absolutely destroyed by the west because of this whole computer thing and you're telling me that it's because we can't fit our language onto this keyboard are you kidding me what are we gonna do about it so the chinese government made this a huge priority and they finally started to develop some things that worked got it the first major system of typing used the qwerty keyboard to build the shape of the characters uh we call it and it was pretty darn complicated it's basically like um like puzzles like like legos yeah kind of like a brick kind of like you just put things together i can write basic characters using that the system was clever but it was complicated and not very fast at first luckily china had a wild card up its sleeve that would help get chinese speakers typing on a qwerty keyboard it had to do with this guy chairman mao [Applause] the great chinese chairman mao zedong history time here we go the communist party propaganda machine portrays the chairman's great leap forward as a dazzling success mao was really bullish about modernizing china and one of his pet projects was scrapping the entire chinese character system and replacing it with a western style alphabet that sounds out chinese words sort of like how we sound out our english or italian or spanish words now was like learning thousands of chinese characters is hard and complicated so why don't we just have a latin romanized alphabet like the rest of the world so by 1949 mao was like ready to roll scrapping the entire chinese writing system in the name of a roman alphabet but then one of his close buddies former communist dictator joseph stalin convinced mao not to totally kill off chinese characters stalin was like dude don't do this you're gonna regret it and mal was like fine so he kept the chinese characters as the main writing system but for teaching literacy in schools he developed a written alphabet called pinyin p-i-n-y-i-n [Music] where you can use the roman letters to spell out chinese words by the way that they sound okay so right now you are typing out this sentence in romanized characters in the way that it would be phonetically spelled in in roman in like wool is w-o right yes okay so you type it all out yeah and then down there it can it renders it okay wow so now if you want to write the word beef which is nyorao how to say beef i think nyoro i've no idea instead of memorizing these characters which means beef you can just spell it out by the way it sounds this romanization of chinese again it's called pinyin would become really helpful years later when the chinese government is trying to figure out how to get their people to type on western computers but wait a minute we can't go on before we mention a little bit of geopolitics okay so it's the 1940s mao and his communist revolutionaries are taking over mainland china in a bloody revolution and civil war and the chinese government that they overthrow and are fighting with end up losing and retreating to an island nearby called taiwan to continue their non-communist version of china and they both think that they're the real china and they start this war that has never stopped and they're still fighting this war and they both think they're china and anyway that is absolutely a story i want to tell but i am not going there now again blinders were talking about qwerty keyboards really trying to figure something out we need to focus okay so you have these two chinas the communist one the non-communist one mao is pushing the romanized alphabet in the communist version of china and taiwan is like no this romanized pinyin thing is an invention of the communist party and a total sellout of the chinese traditional writing system no way but taiwan is secretly like we love the idea of having an alphabet for our chinese language because it makes it a lot easier to teach literacy so they adopt an alphabet but it's not the pinyin romanized alphabet it is an old alphabetic system that was developed in the early 1900s it's doing they did it before pinging they completely newly invented this set of symbols for this purpose wow that is wild so because they hated their communist enemies taiwan rejected the romanized alphabet that mao was pushing and stuck with this traditional alphabet that had been developed a few years earlier and that's still how it is today [Music] so this gets to a pretty satisfying answer to the question of this entire video which is how do chinese speakers type on a qwerty keyboard the answer is if you go to mainland china you're going to see keyboards like this people in mainland china use this keyboard to type out the sounds of their words and then the computer takes that and renders it into chinese characters if you live in taiwan you'll see a keyboard that looks more like this but you basically do the same thing you use these characters to type out the sounds of the word and the computer will render it into a chinese character both of these are new writing systems that were developed in the past 100 years to help chinese speakers spell out their words and move away from a character-based system what are the key features that you think should be in the ideal laptop standby for the software transmission you better start your recorders now okay back to our timeline here it's the 80s and 90s china is starting to really adopt technology and they're using these typing methods to use the qwerty keyboard to actually participate in the computing world but they are still lacking so far behind the western world they're way slower in their typing so the chinese government went back to the drawing boards and was like how can we make it faster and boy did they find a solution in the 80s that would change everything [Music] and this is where it gets kind of juicy in my opinion like this is the part that like i don't know really helps me understand how people type today you know when you go to google and you start typing a sentence and it like fills out the rest of the sentence for you or even on gmail these days like i'll be typing and suddenly it'll like predict what i want to say it's pretty cool it's not life-changing it sort of like saves me maybe a couple milliseconds every day in china this technology of predictive text and predictive typing was life-changing because regardless of what method you use to start building your characters in the computer the computer now starts to guess what characters you want to type for example let's say someone is using one of these systems the one where you build characters and they type this character this is the root of a chinese word and it means water the computer sees this and says okay you just typed water there's a bunch of characters that are derived from this root this water root for example here's the one for river or maybe you actually want this one which is the word for wash so if you just type water you can look at these options and decide which one you want this was an algorithmic predictive typing system that was happening in the late 1980s in china three whole decades before anything similar surfaced in the west and it is this technology of predictive text that changed everything for china before computers there was no practical way to type the thousands of characters called kanji to deal with the complexity of these symbol words different systems have been adopted they started to refine this algorithm to make it more and more clear that as soon as you start typing anything the algorithm says do you want to do this or this or this or this i mean i have been watching a great deal of of competitions typing competitions this is a thing in china and if you zoom in and look closely at these competitions you'll see that as soon as these competitors start typing a pop-up box comes up giving them an algorithmically generated menu of options that predicts what they are trying to type so typing in chinese is as much about choosing from this predictive menu as it is about pressing the keys it is a combination of both and this competition has pushed developers to make better and better predictive algorithms so that people can communicate very efficiently using the keyboard so how fast are these people typing right now well the average english speaker can type at around 43 words per minute i work on a computer all day so i'm probably more like 60 65 words per minute there is an english typing competition in las vegas and the type is here are a mind blowing 163 words per minute but if you head back to these guys these people are typing at a score of 242 words per minute [Music] four times faster than i can type and almost double what they're typing in english at the best competition in las vegas whoa wow that's fast yeah it's fast so china used this technology that was developed in the west mainly designed for languages that are very different than chinese and they mastered it but guess what the chinese government still has the need for speed they're like how can we make it faster so predictive typing in china went from letting you start a character and predicting what character you want to choose to then going to seeing what character you just put and predicting the next one the next word in the sentence that you want to say and now in the last few years they are pushing it to the next level which is cloud-based predictive texting again the closest thing we have to this in the west is like the google auto-complete you go to the search engine you start typing and the internet is like a lot of people are searching this so we think you're searching this too but imagine instead of just a search engine imagine if this concept were everywhere as you're typing your word document as you're texting your mom anywhere in the digital space that is connected to the internet is now feeding you sentences that they think maybe you want to say based on an ai generated web of information of what everyone else is texting and emailing and writing so an example of this is let's say there's a chinese movie star that just got in a big car accident it's all over the news and everybody's talking about it you've never typed this movie star's name before but as soon as you do start typing it your phone starts talking to the cloud and not just the internet but other people's text messages so then the algorithm says i think that you probably want to text about this movie star and their car accident and this seems like a great time saving technology that helps chinese speakers type it's a great idea but just imagine some scenarios here let's say that you're not writing about a movie star in a car accident but let's say instead you're texting a friend about june 4th 1989 tiananmen square the noise of gunfire rose from all over the center of peking china is a nation at war with itself there's one major company that owns the software this one company determines most of what shows up in predictive text and in a country where there's not a lot of hesitation to control citizens access to information it's not a far stretch to see how subtle manipulation could start to occur with this cloud predictive text now there's an algorithm deciding sort of what should go next for example if you type in taiwan is china the algorithm will suggest to you taiwan is an inseparable part of china anyway this is not a major problem right now and i'm not saying that the government is manipulating every individual in china with predictive text all i'm saying is that the story of how chinese speakers have been able to type on the qwerty keyboard is the story of really clever and amazing technological advancements and a huge part of that has been predictive algorithms and all i'm saying is that algorithmically presented information can lead to some dangerous outcomes in terms of making people think a certain way but at the end of the day let us just end on the fact that china has developed a really amazing technology for getting their language into the computer and by doing so have been able to pass up any typists in the west helping fuel the rise of china as a technological powerhouse that's the story here and i really learned a lot thank you all for watching i will see you soon and thanks for being here
2021-08-27 13:36
