He developed cell phones. It changed the way people all over the world talk to each other – and

Dick Tracy acquired an atom-driven two-way list radio in 1946. Marty Cooper never forgot about it.

The Chicago boy became a star engineer who ran Motorola’s research and development division when his hometown Telecommunications Titan was trapped in the corporate battle of the 1970s to invent portable phones. Cooper refused to bet on the AT&T on the car phone, betting that America wanted to feel like an armed Dick Tracy, “you’re now able to get your extension, device anywhere.”

Fifty-two years ago, Cooper declared the victory on a call from the Manhattan sidewalk to the head of AT&T’s rival program. His 4-pound Dynatac 8000X has evolved into a global collective of billions of smartphones. According to the Association of Global Mobile Network Operators, approximately 60% of the world, 60% of the world has acquired mobile internet.

The small computers we carry for billions of dollars are becoming massive, interlinked networks of processors that perform calculations per second, the computational power required by artificial intelligence. Once used to call friends and family, simple landlines have evolved into ubiquitous, glossy screens that never leave our eyesight, flooding our brains with hours of data each day, and delving into us with endless messages, emails, videos and soundtracks that many people play to block the outside world at all times.

All of this is monitored by the now 96-year-old mobile phone inventor from his home in Del Mar, California. One of the Coopers is certainly true. The revolution has really just begun.

The phone is about to become a thinking computer

Currently, the winner of the 2024 National Medal of Technology and Innovation (the highest honor for technical achievement) focuses on the impending transition to thinking mobile computers fueled by human calories to avoid reliance on batteries. Our new parts will run constant tests in our bodies and feed the doctors real-time results, predicted Cooper.

“It would allow people to predict illness before it happens,” Cooper imagines. “People will die of old age and accidents, but they will not die of illness. It is a medical revolution.”

Human behavior is already adapted to smartphones, and some observers say they use them as tools that allow overwhelming minds to focus on quality communication.

Claude Fisher, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley and author of America Calling: A Social History of the Choney to 1940, has made telephone conversations the most intimate way of communicating social connections.

For almost everyone, straight phones are a break-in. Now everything must be preceded by a message. “It seems there’s a sense that phones are not just about exchanging information, but are for the heart,” Fisher says.

And this is from a 20-year-old, “The only person I call everyday is my cousin,” says Ayesha Iqbal, a psychology student at Suffolk County Community College. “I mainly text everyone else.”

Katherine Lewis, 19, a student in child education, agrees that “text messages are used to be used as nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, just like personal.”

However, the roles may be reversed. Diana Cunningham Pop, 68, of Overbrook, Kansas. 1005 uses group texts to keep in touch with children and grandchildren. Her 18-year-old granddaughter Brindal Hoover, a senior at nearby Lawrence High School, says she prefers voice calls to text messages because she understands, “Oh, how should we have a conversation?”

When she was a girl, Karen Wilson’s family shared a party line with other phone customers outside of Buffalo, New York. Wilson, 79, shocked her granddaughter by talking about the party line when the girl got her cell phone as a teenager.

“What if I didn’t wait?” the girl asked. Her grandmother replied: “You went down to their house and you cried out, “Hey, Mary, will you come out?” ”

The brave new world has prices

Many are worried about the changes that will be exerted by a newly interconnected, highly stimulated world.

We are increasingly buying online and offering products without the possibility of serendipity. They rarely get to greet neighbors and store employees, find something unexpected, make friends, or fall in love. People work more efficiently while still owning.

“There’s no barrier to the number of people who can reach out to you at the same time. It’s just overwhelming,” says Deputy Circuit Judge Kristen Burks of Macon, Missouri.

Most importantly, according to sociologists, psychologists and teachers, almost constant phone-driven screen time reduces children’s learning and social skills. The growing movement opposes the invasion of cell phone children’s daily lives.

“At the turn of the millennium, technology companies based on the West Coast of the United States have created a world-changing set of products,” says New York University social psychologist Jonathan Hyde, who has been on the New York Times bestseller list for a year in The Unrest Generation.

“By creating addictive content firefighters from children’s eyes and ears and warding off physical play and face-to-face socialisation, these companies rewired their childhoods and changed human development on a scale that is almost unimaginable,” he writes.

Seven states have signed and 20 have implemented it, but schools have a bell-to-bell mobile phone ban. Additional states moved to ban them during education hours.

That doesn’t work with smartphone inventors who say there’s a better solution than regulations. “To respond to disruptive technologies, we need disruptive solutions,” Cooper writes from Del Mar.

Global inequality is the problem

Its advantage comes to countries that are richer than poorer.

When Nnaemeka Agbo had to leave his family in Nigeria for the first time, life closed him to Russia for research, as he was increasingly desperate to migrate to seek better opportunities.

When he moved there in 2023, adjusting to life in Russia was tough, he says, but one thing that kept him going. WhatsApp is called family. “One of the things that made me feel sane was that I would call my house every time, so I made them feel like I was getting close to my people,” says the 31-year-old.

In a country that is one of the world’s most poverty and hunger levels despite being the top oil producer in Africa, the Agbo experience has forced many young people in Nigeria to choose whether to stay home with their families or aim for a better life elsewhere. According to a Gallup survey released last October, at least 37% of African adults expressed their desire to live elsewhere in 2023.

For many, phone calls blur the distance and provide comfort.

“No matter how busy my schedule is, even if it’s the only call I have to make, I have to call my people every weekend,” Agbo says.

According to the International Telecommunication Union, in 2023, in Africa, only 37% of the population can access the internet, is the only option many have. In Zamfara, in northern Nigeria, Abdulmalik Sadhu said that because of the extremely low mobile connection rate, “sometimes we stay for a few weeks without a network.”

It takes days to call his parents in Sierra Leone when he flew from Sierra Leone to the US to study international relations in 1971. A call costs around $150 within 10 minutes. “There was no additional talk or complementary time, because it all costs,” recalls Deen-Cole, 73.

Tabangsyce, who moved from Senegal to Spain in 2023, calls about investing Spanish income from home. Otherwise, all are text or audio notes, with one exception.

His mother doesn’t read or write, but when she calls out, “as if I was standing next to her,” Cise says. “It brings memories. It’s a joy.”

He couldn’t do it without a cell phone. And, leaving half the world, it suits Marty Cooper well.

“Today, there are more mobile phones in the world than people,” says Cooper. “Your life can be infinitely efficient because you are connected to everyone else in the world. But you have to tell us that this is just the beginning.”

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