Qualcomm CEO: “Resistance is futile” as 6G mobile revolution approaches

I remember sending my first email in the early 1990s, a clunky experience which meant logging on to two different computer systems. I thought it would never replace the much swifter fax. The internet was already revolutionizing the flow of information and, as the editor of The Guardian’s gargantuan media section in the U.K. (printed every week with 50 pages of job ads), I was the proud owner of one of the first ‘WAP-enabled’ mobile telephones. I mused in the front-cover headline whether this was “the end of newspapers?”. 

Newspapers fight on and today I am at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, contemplating the next technological revolution. It turns out it’s a bit more consequential than the arrival of email. 

Thousands of digital leaders from around the world are here, displaying the latest in robotics, quantum computing, and IQ AI, which is grappling with the relationship between us—humans—and the multitude of AI agents that proffer help and arouse suspicion. 

One of the largest pavilions in the seven exhibition halls of installations and exhibits (robots making sushi, virtual-reality table football, cars that are phones, medical devices that might save the world) is the home of Qualcomm. Number 117 on the Fortune 500 list, the telecommunications giant was founded in San Diego in the 1980s and is now at the heart of a debate about a tech-enabled world. 

Mobile 6G sounds prosaic—just another development phase for cellphones which started with phone calls (2G), brought us texts (3G), data (4G) and smartphones (5G). 

It isn’t. 6G will be the telecommunication system for the AI age—for all the........

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