Description
The man credited with inventing the cell phone 50 years ago had only one concern about the brick-sized device with a long antenna: would it work? These days, Martin Cooper worries like everyone else about the impacts of his invention on society, from the loss of privacy to the risk of Internet addiction to the rapid spread of harmful content, especially among children. . "My most negative point of view is that we don't have privacy anymore because everything about us is now stored somewhere and available to someone who has a pretty intense desire to have it," said Cooper, who spoke with the Associated Press at the larger event. of the telecommunications industry. . trade fair in Barcelona, where he received a lifetime award.
However, the 94-year-old self-proclaimed dreamer also marvels at the evolution of mobile phone design and capabilities, and believes that the best days of technology may yet lie ahead in areas like education and healthcare.
“Between the cell phone and medical technology and the Internet, we are going to beat the disease,” he told MWC, or Mobile World Congress, on Monday.
Cooper, whose invention was inspired by Dick Tracy's wristwatch radio, said he also envisions a future where cellphones are powered by human bodies.
This is far from where it started.
Cooper made the first public call from a cell phone on a New York street on April 3, 1973, using a prototype his team at Motorola had begun designing just five months earlier.
To run the competition, Cooper used the Dyna-TAC prototype, which weighed 2.5 pounds and measured 11 inches long, to call out his rival at AT&T-owned Bell Labs.
“The only thing I was worried about was, 'Is this going to work?' And he did," he said.
The call helped start the cell phone revolution, but looking back on that day, Cooper acknowledges that "we had no way of knowing that this was the historic moment."
He spent the better part of the next decade bringing a commercial version of the device to market, helping launch the wireless communications industry and with it a global revolution in the way we communicate, shop, and discover the world.
Still, Cooper said he's "not crazy" about the shape of modern smartphones, blocks of plastic, metal and glass. He thinks phones will evolve so that they are "scattered across your body," perhaps as sensors that "measure your health at all times."
The batteries could even be replaced by human power.
“You eat food, you create energy. Why not have this receptor for your ear embedded under your skin, powered by your body? I imagine.
While dreaming of what the future might look like, Cooper is aware of the industry's current challenges, particularly when it comes to privacy.
In Europe, where there are strict data privacy rules, regulators are concerned about apps and digital ads that track user activity, allowing tech companies and others to build rich user profiles.
"It's going to be resolved, but not easily," Cooper said. "Now there are people who can justify measuring where you are, where you make your phone calls, who you call, what you access on the Internet."
Children's smartphone use is another area that requires limits, Cooper said. One idea is to have "multiple websites curated for different audiences."
Five-year-olds should be able to use the Internet to help them learn, but "we don't want them to have access to pornography and things they don't understand," he said.
As for his own use of the phone, Cooper says he checks his emails and looks up information online to resolve arguments at the table.
However, "there are a lot of things I haven't learned yet," he said. "I still don't know what TikTok is."
