MWC 2023: Father of cellphone sees dark side but also hope in new tech

Cooper, the inventor of first commercial mobile phone, during an interview with The Associated Press during the Mobile World Congress 2023 in Barcelona, Spain, on Feb 27, 2023. 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’. — AP

BARCELONA, Spain: 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.