Martin Cooperwho is considered one of the “fathers” of the mobile phone, at MWC 2023 in Barcelona, ​​dared to make the following prediction for the CNBC media: “The next generation will have a phone implanted under the skin of the ears“. If we use science fiction, this idea is by no means new, and it doesn’t seem crazy that it can be achieved in the not-too-distant future.

American-born Martin Cooper is currently 94 years old and managed to make the first cell phone call 50 years ago from Sixth Avenue in New York. He called his main AT&T competitor, Joel S. Engel, with a Motorola DynaTAC 8000x prototype. Despite this milestone, mobile phones would have to wait a few more decades before they really took off.

Martín Cooper’s presence at MWC 2023 is not trivial. In addition to being considered one of the pioneers in the industry, he has also received awards in recognition of his career. At this point, it is worth recalling the Prince of Asturias Award he received in 2009 together with Ray Tomlinson, the inventor of e-mail.

Cooper took the prediction and said so the human body itself could be the “perfect charger” for a future cell phone that would be implanted under the skin of the ear. If you “eat food, your body creates energy. It would take little energy to run that headset.”

The American engineer also revealed that every time he has to talk on the phone and doesn’t have a headset, he’s forced to hold a “flat piece of material” (clearly related to a smartphone) against his curved head and hold his arm in an uncomfortable position.

The idea of ​​a small mobile device that would be embedded in the ear clashes a bit with Cooper’s acknowledgment that privacy is a serious issue and that mobile addiction is a real problem. Despite this, Cooper maintains his faith in humanity, or at least that seems to be contained in his statements.

Another aspect that Cooper admitted is the fact that he did not expect mobile phones to become cameras or encyclopedias, as well as the ability to perform many other functions, because mobile phones are just computers with a different layout than a computer. laptop or desktop PC. Here is a very influential context of fifty years ago, when there was no internet, no large-scale integrated circuits and no digital cameras.

Cover image from Wikipedia, distributed under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license.