BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — With a bulky brick cell phone he’s believed to have invented 50 years ago, Martin Cooper ponders the future.
When he made his first call from a thick gray prototype on the streets of New York City, our world and our information were encapsulated in a sleek glass exterior where we search, connect, like and buy. Little did I know that it would be standardized.
He is optimistic that future advances in mobile technology can change human lives, but he is also concerned about the risks smartphones pose to privacy. and young people.
“My most negative opinion is that we no longer have privacy because everything about us is recorded somewhere and accessible to someone with a strong desire to obtain it. ‘, the 94-year-old man told The Associated Press at MWC. Mobile World Congressthe world’s largest wireless trade show This week he was awarded a lifetime award in Barcelona.
Besides worrying about invasions of privacy, Cooper acknowledges the negative impacts that come with smartphones and social media.Internet addiction and making it easy for children to access harmful content, etc..
But Cooper describes himself as a dreamer and an optimist, believing advances in mobile phone technology have the potential to revolutionize fields such as education and medicine.
“Between mobile phones, medical technology and the internet, we are conquering disease.
It’s a long way from where he started.
Cooper made the first payphone from a handheld cell phone on the streets of Manhattan on April 3, 1973. It used a prototype device that his team at Motorola had started designing just five months before him.
Cooper famously used a Dyna-TAC phone to call a Bell Labs rival owned by AT&T. It was literally the world’s first brick phone, weighing 2.5 pounds and measuring 11 inches. Cooper spent most of his next decade bringing commercial versions of the device to market.
The phone kicked off the mobile phone revolution, but looking back at that moment 50 years later, “there was no way to know it was a historic moment,” Cooper said.
“The only thing I was worried about was, ‘Will this work?’ And it did,” he said Monday.
While paving the way for the wireless communications industry, he wanted mobile phone technology to be in its infancy.
Cooper said he was “not crazy” about the shape of modern smartphones, blocks of plastic, metal and glass. , perhaps thinking that sensors will become “always measuring health”.
Batteries could even replace human energy.
“The human body is a charging station, right? .
Cooper also acknowledged that progress has a dark side. It’s a risk to privacy and children.
European regulatorif you have strict data privacy rulesand elsewhere, there is interest in apps and digital advertising that track user activity, allowing technology and digital advertising companies to build rich profiles of their users.
“We’ll get there, but it won’t be easy,” says Cooper. “Now there are people who can justify measuring where you are, where you are calling, who you are calling, what you are accessing on the Internet.”
Children’s smartphone use Another area where restrictions are needed, Cooper said. One of his ideas is to have “various internet curated for different audiences.”
Five-year-olds should be able to use the internet to learn, but “I don’t want them to have access to porn or anything they don’t understand,” he said.
The inspiration for Cooper’s mobile phone idea wasn’t Star Trek’s Personal Communicator, but rather the radio watch radio of detective Dick Tracy from the comic strip. Regarding his own use of the phone, Cooper says he checks e-mail and searches for information online to resolve disputes at the dinner table.
But “there’s a lot we haven’t learned yet,” he said. “I still don’t know what TikTok is.”
