Xavi Diaz |
Barcelona (EFE).- The American engineer Martin Cooper, who invented the mobile phone, believes that this device “has become an extension of the person” and that we are “only at the beginning” of the changes that await us, and he imagines a future with mobiles adapted to each person and even integrated into the body.
Cooper (Chicago, 1928), who this week has been recognized for his career at the MWC, the world’s largest mobile technology event, will also go down in history for having made the first mobile phone call, which occurred on April 1973.
Almost 50 years after that historic moment, Cooper recalls in an interview with EFE who was the recipient of that call made with a Motorola DynaTac 8000X, a “Shoephone” weighing almost one kilo that took 10 hours to charge and was barely 30 minutes of autonomy.
Cooper dialed the number of his competitor counterpart: Joel Engel, then head of the research department at Bell Laboratories. He chose to call the rival company, he says, because Bell at the time treated Motorola with a certain amount of contempt, as if they didn’t know what they were doing. “Joel, I’m calling from a mobile phone. From a real one, ”he told her. And then there was “silence” on the other side of the line, he recalls.
“We didn’t imagine there would be digital cameras or the Internet, but we did know that one day everyone would have a cell phone,” Cooper says.
At 94 years old, Cooper, Prince of Asturias Award winner in 2009, has become a celebrity in this edition of the MWC. Not surprisingly, he was the inventor of the mobile walking through the mobile congress and everyone recognized those stripes.
If already in 1973 he proved to be a futurist, Cooper continues with that same mentality and predicts that there is still a long way to go.
From the outset, he distances himself from current mobile phones: “I don’t like ‘smarphones’ very much. I don’t think they are very smart, ”he opines.
He considers that mobile phones today try to provide too many functions to the entire population, without customizing, and that the ideal would be for them to know what you want to do and do it automatically, without you having to look for an application.
Regarding the future that awaits us with mobile phones, he predicts: “We are only at the very beginning” and predicts that they will help us solve major current problems.
Mobile phones that will help detect diseases
From the outset, he believes that they will increase efficiency and productivity and thus contribute to “eliminating poverty.”
Secondly, they will contribute to education, since they will make the information available to everyone. “Teachers will have to teach how to discriminate useful information from misinformation,” she says.
And finally, he considers that they will play a “crucial” role in health matters. “In the future, thanks to the fact that the mobile is an extension of the person, it will be monitoring you all the time. And when you start to get sick, before you are, your mobile will transmit that information to a computer and you will be notified to go see a doctor or to be cured, and the disease will not occur ”, he assures.
Still, Cooper admits that mobile phones have downsides, too. “The (lack) of privacy is the main risk” of current technology, to which must be added the addiction “to screens”, he specifies, although he believes that the positive aspects clearly outweigh the negatives.
A unique mobile for each person and even integrated into the body
In the new technological revolution that is yet to come, Cooper imagines a personalized mobile for each person, adapted to the needs of those who use it and capable of “anticipating what you want” thanks to artificial intelligence.
Talking about the future, Cooper, whose mobile phone is connected to his hearing aid wirelessly, says that the device of the future should be tailored to the function it performs and the specific needs of each person.
“For me, the ideal would be for the mobile to be incorporated under your skin, under your ear. With a computer inside. It would not need a battery because your body would already be a battery. And when you wanted to talk to someone and you said ‘put Joe on the phone’ the computer would do it (…) instead of picking up a piece of plastic and placing it against your head, holding it in an awkward position”, he comments.
“But you will also have patches or made-up things that will measure things on your body,” he says.
Along the same lines, he predicts a future with a personalized mobile, adapted to the characteristics of each one, “because the mobile will be looking for diseases that are related to your genetics,” he adds as a continuation of this futuristic story.
And when the journalist asks him if it can’t be dangerous for his health to carry all that on his body, Cooper smiles and argues that he already wears a knee replacement or false teeth.
“The fact is that humans have better brains, but we are defective. We don’t smell as well as a dog. (…) So why shouldn’t we incorporate things into our bodies?” she wonders.
