“The mobile phone is an extension of the human being, and it is only the beginning.”

Xavi Diaz |

Barcelona (EFE). – American engineer Martin Cooper, who invented the mobile phone, believes that this device has “become an extension of the individual” and that we are “only at the beginning” of the changes that await us. He imagined a future with mobile phones that adapt to each person and even integrate into the body.

Cooper (Chicago, 1928), who was honored this week for his career at MWC, the world’s largest mobile technology event, will also go down in history because he made the first mobile phone call, which happened in April 1973.

Almost 50 years after that historic moment, Cooper recalls in an interview with EFE who received that call made with a Motorola DynaTac 8000X, a “shoephone” weighing almost one kilogram that took 10 hours to charge and had barely 30 minutes of autonomy .

Cooper called the number of his rival: Joel Engel, then head of research at Bell Labs. He chose to contact the competing company, he says, because at the time Bell treated Motorola with a certain amount of disdain, as if they didn’t know what they were doing. “Joel, I’m calling from a cell phone. He tells her.” Then there was “silence” on the other side of the line, he recalled.

“We didn’t imagine there would be digital cameras or the Internet, but we knew that one day everyone would have a cell phone,” Cooper says.

At 94 years old, Cooper, who won the Prince of Asturias Award in 2009, has become a celebrity this edition of MWC. Not surprisingly, he was the inventor of the mobile phone walking into a mobile conference and everyone recognized those stripes.

If already in 1973 he proves to be a futurist, Cooper continues with the same mindset and expectation that there is still a long way to go.
From the beginning, he distanced himself from current cell phones: “I don’t like ‘smartphones’ very much. I don’t think they’re very smart.”

He considers that today’s mobile phones try to provide many functions to the entire population, without personalization, and that the best is that they know what you want to do and do it automatically, without having to search for an application.

Regarding the future that lies ahead with mobile phones, he predicts: “We are only at the beginning” and predicts that they will help us solve major current problems.

Cell phones that help detect diseases

From the outset, it is believed that it will increase efficiency and productivity and thus contribute to the ‘end of poverty’.

Secondly, they will contribute to education, because they will make information available to everyone. “Educators will have to teach how to distinguish useful information from misleading information,” he says.

Finally, it is considered that they will play a “decisive” role in matters of health. “In the future, thanks to the fact that the mobile phone is an extension of the person, it will monitor you all the time. And when you start to get sick, before you get sick, your mobile phone will transmit this information to a computer and you will be notified to go to the doctor or to be cured, and the disease will not happen, ”he says. Confirms.

However, Cooper admits that cell phones also have downsides. He explains that “(lack of) privacy is the main danger” of current technology, to which must be added the addiction of “screens”, though he believes the positive aspects clearly outweigh the negatives.

A unique mobile for each person and even integrated into the body

In the new technological revolution yet to come, Cooper envisions a mobile for each person, adapting to the needs of those who use it and able to “predict what you want” thanks to artificial intelligence.

Speaking of the future, Cooper, whose mobile phone connects to his hearing aid wirelessly, says the receiver’s device must be tailored to the function it performs and the specific needs of each person.

“For me, the ideal would be to embed the phone under your skin and under your ear. With a computer inside. It wouldn’t need a battery because your body would already be a battery. And when you want to talk to someone and you say ‘Put Joe on the phone,’ the computer will do that (. ..) than picking up a piece of plastic and putting it on your head, holding it in an inconvenient position, ”comments.

“But you will also have patches or prostheses that will measure things on your body,” he says.

In the same vein, it predicts a future with a personalized cell phone, adapting to the characteristics of each one, “because the cell phone will look for diseases linked to your genetics,” he adds as a continuation of this future story.

And when the reporter asks him if it’s dangerous for his health to carry all that on his body, Cooper smiles and says he’s already wearing knee replacements or false teeth.

“The truth is, humans have better brains, but we’re flawed. We don’t smell like a dog. (…) So why don’t we incorporate things into our bodies?”, he wonders.