The man credited with inventing the cellphone 50 years ago had only one concern then about the brick-sized device with a long antenna: Would it work?
These days Martin Cooper frets like everybody else about his invention’s impacts on society — from the loss of privacy to the risk of internet addiction to the rapid spread of harmful content, especially among kids.
“My most negative opinion is we don’t have any privacy anymore because everything about us is now recorded someplace and accessible to somebody who has enough intense desire to get it,” said Cooper, who spoke at the telecom industry’s biggest trade show in Barcelona, where he was receiving a lifetime award.
Photo: AP
Yet the 94-year-old self-described dreamer also marvels at how far cellphone design and capabilities have advanced, and he believes the technology’s best days may still be ahead of it in areas such as education and health care.
“Between the cellphone and medical technology and the Internet, we are going to conquer disease,” he said Monday at MWC, or Mobile World Congress.
Cooper, whose invention was inspired by Dick Tracy’s radio wristwatch, said he also envisions a future in which cellphones are charged by human bodies.
Phots: AP
It’s a long way from where he started.
Cooper made the first public call from a handheld portable telephone on a New York City street on April 3, 1973, using a prototype that his team at Motorola had started designing only five months earlier.
To needle the competition, Cooper used the Dyna-TAC prototype — which weighed 2.5 pounds and was 11 inches long — to call to his rival at Bell Labs, owned by AT&T.
“The only thing that I was worried about: ‘Is this thing going to work?’ And it did,” he said.
The call helped kick-start the cellphone revolution, but looking back on that day Cooper acknowledges, “we had no way of knowing this was the historic moment.”
He spent the better part of the next decade working to bring a commercial version of the device to market, helping to launch the wireless communications industry and, with it, a global revolution in how we communicate, shop and learn about 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 will be “distributed on your body,” perhaps as sensors “measuring your health at all times.”
Batteries could even be replaced by human energy.
“You ingest food, you create energy. Why not have this receiver for your ear embedded under your skin, powered by your body?” he imagined.
While he dreams about what the future might look like, Cooper is attuned to the industry’s current challenges, particularly around privacy.
In Europe, where there are strict data privacy rules, regulators are concerned about apps and digital ads that track user activity, allowing technology and other companies to build up rich profiles of users.
“It’s going to get resolved, but not easily,” Cooper said. “There are people now that can justify measuring where you are, where you’re making your phone calls, who you’re calling, what you access on the Internet.”
Smartphone use by children is another area that needs limits, Cooper said. One idea is to have “various Internets 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 to things that they don’t understand,” he said.
As for his own phone use, Cooper says he checks email and does online searches for information to settle dinner table arguments.
However, “there are many things that I have not yet learned,” he said. “I still don’t know what TikTok is.”
JUNE 30 to JULY 6 After being routed by the Japanese in the bloody battle of Baguashan (八卦山), Hsu Hsiang (徐驤) and a handful of surviving Hakka fighters sped toward Tainan. There, he would meet with Liu Yung-fu (劉永福), leader of the Black Flag Army who had assumed control of the resisting Republic of Formosa after its president and vice-president fled to China. Hsu, who had been fighting non-stop for over two months from Taoyuan to Changhua, was reportedly injured and exhausted. As the story goes, Liu advised that Hsu take shelter in China to recover and regroup, but Hsu steadfastly
On Sunday, President William Lai (賴清德) delivered a strategically brilliant speech. It was the first of his “Ten Lectures on National Unity,” (團結國家十講) focusing on the topic of “nation.” Though it has been eclipsed — much to the relief of the opposing Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) — by an ill-advised statement in the second speech of the series, the days following Lai’s first speech were illuminating on many fronts, both domestic and internationally, in highlighting the multi-layered success of Lai’s strategic move. “OF COURSE TAIWAN IS A COUNTRY” Never before has a Taiwanese president devoted an entire speech to
Small, fuzzy and baring sharp teeth, Chinese toymaker Pop Mart’s Labubu monster dolls have taken over the world, drawing excited crowds at international stores and adorning the handbags of celebrities such as Rihanna and Cher. Beijing-based Pop Mart is part of a rising tide of Chinese cultural exports gaining traction abroad, furry ambassadors of a “cool” China even in places associated more with negative public opinion of Beijing such as Europe and North America. Labubus, which typically sell for around US$40, are released in limited quantities and sold in “blind boxes,” meaning buyers don’t know the exact model they will receive. The dolls
Focus Taiwan reported last week that government figures showed unemployment in Taiwan is at historic lows: “The local unemployment rate fell 0.02 percentage points from a month earlier to 3.30 percent in May, the lowest level for the month in 25 years.” Historical lows in joblessness occurred earlier this year as well. The context? Labor shortages. The National Development Council (NDC) expects that Taiwan will be short 400,000 workers by 2030, now just five years away. The depth of the labor crisis is masked by the hundreds of thousands of migrant workers which the economy absolutely depends on, and the
RSS