The inventor who paved the way for the smartphone foresees a future where these precious devices are embedded right into our heads.
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Marty Cooper, 89, who created the world’s first portable phone, predicts we will one day implant a tiny computer in the skin behind our ears, which will pick up on our voices.
“It will take a couple of generations before we fulfil the real promise of what the cell phone is,” he recently told Motherboard.
Innovation won’t stop with an embedded chip, either.
“Someday you’ll be able to think though it,” he said.
This is a reference to the Age of Singularity — a theory that the human brain and computers will one day fuse into one, giving us the full power of technology.
Our current designs, while powerful are inconvenient, Mr Cooper said.
“Think about how unnatural it is to want to talk to somebody and [have to] hold this flat piece of material up to your head. It doesn’t make any sense at all.”
Mr Cooper’s original portable phone was the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, which had 30 minutes of battery life, an equivalent price tag of more than $10,0000 and weighed almost a whole kilogram.