Martin Cooperwho is considered one of the “fathers” of the mobile phone, has dared to make the following prediction for the CNBC medium at the MWC 2023 in Barcelona: “The next generation will have the phone implanted under the skin of the ears”. If we use science fiction, the idea is by no means new, and it does not seem crazy that this can be achieved in the not too distant future.
Martin Cooper, born and with American nationality, is currently 94 years old and managed to make the first call with a mobile phone 50 years ago from Sixth Avenue in New York. The call was made to his main AT&T competitor, Joel S. Engel, with a prototype of the Motorola DynaTAC 8000x. Despite this milestone, mobile phones would still have to wait a couple more decades to really start to become widespread.
The presence of Martín Cooper at MWC 2023 is not trivial. Apart from being considered one of the pioneers of the sector, he has also collected an award in recognition of his career. At this point, it is worth remembering the Prince of Asturias Award that he received in 2009 together with Ray Tomlinson, the inventor of email.
Taking up the prediction, Cooper has said that the human body itself could be the “perfect charger” for that future mobile that would be implanted under the skin of the ear. If you “eat food, your body creates energy. It would take little power to run that headset.”
The American engineer has also exposed that, every time he has to make a phone call and does not have a headset, he is forced to hold a “flat piece of material” (in clear reference to a smartphone) against his curved head and hold the arm in a position that is uncomfortable for you.
The idea of a small mobile device that would be embedded in the ear clashes a bit with the Cooper’s acknowledgment that privacy is a serious issue and that addiction to mobile devices is a real problem. Despite this, Cooper maintains his faith in humanity, or at least that seems to distill in his statements.
Another aspect that Cooper has acknowledged is the fact that he did not expect mobile phones to become cameras or encyclopedias, as well as being able to do many other functions because mobile phones are just computers with a different layout than a computer. laptop or desktop PC. Here the context of fifty years ago, when there was no Internet, large-scale integrated circuits and digital cameras, is very influential.
Cover image from Wikipedia, distributed under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license.
