“Dick Tracy” got an atom-powered, two-way wrist radio in 1946. Marty Cooper never forgot it.
The Chicago boy became a star engineer who ran Motorola’s research and development arm when the hometown telecommunications titan was locked in a 1970s corporate battle to invent the portable phone. Cooper rejected AT&T’s wager on the car phone, betting that America wanted to feel like Dick Tracy, armed with “a device that was an extension of you, that made you reachable everywhere.”
Fifty-two years ago, Cooper declared victory in a call from a Manhattan sidewalk to the head of AT&T’s rival program. His four-pound DynaTAC 8000X has evolved into a global population of billions of smartphones weighing mere ounces apiece. Some 4.6 billion people — nearly 60% of the world — have mobile internet, according to a global association of mobile network operators.
The tiny computers that we carry by the billions are becoming massive, interlinked networks of processors that perform trillions of calculations per second — the computing power that artificial intelligence needs. The simple landlines once used to call friends or family have evolved into omnipresent glossy screens that never leave our sight and flood our brain with hours of data daily, deluging us with endless messages, emails, videos and a soundtrack that many play constantly to block the outside world.
From his home in Del Mar, Calif., the inventor of the mobile phone, now 96, watches all of this. Of one thing Cooper is certain: The revolution has really just begun.
The phone is about to become a thinking computer
Now, the winner of the 2024 National Medal of Technology and Innovation — the United States’ highest honor for technological achievement — is focused on the cellphone’s imminent transition to a thinking mobile computer fueled by human calories to avoid dependence on batteries. Our new parts will run constant tests on our bodies and feed our doctors real-time results, Cooper predicts.
Human behavior is already adapting to smartphones, some observers say, using them as tools that allow overwhelmed minds to focus on quality communication.
The phone conversation has become the way to communicate the most intimate of social ties, says Claude Fischer, a sociology professor at UC Berkeley and author of “America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940.”
For almost everyone, the phone call has become an intrusion. Now everything needs to be pre-advised with a message.
“There seems to be a sense that the phone call is for heart-to-heart,” Fischer says.