Inventing the iPhone has put the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs in the same category of people as Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, the head of Russia’s Channel One, Konstantin Ernst has said.
Ernst was one of the speakers at a symposium on the future of humanity in Moscow, organized by the Russian government on National Unity Day.
“For me personally, Steve Jobs is right there in line with Adolf Hitler, although Hitler is at the front of the line,” Ernst said at the ‘Creating the Future’ event on Monday evening.
Jobs was the CEO of the US tech giant Apple and the driving force behind the invention of the smartphone. The first iPhone was unveiled in January 2007 and hit the market later that year.
“I think the iPhone is an extremely harmful and monstrous thing for humanity,” Ernst said during the panel discussion. “It has destroyed the world of human connections.”
People already no longer visit their parents, Ernst claimed, but prefer to call them instead. “You also reduce communication with your friends to phone calls, and then text messages, because calling is already not culturally acceptable. The same thing happens with children,” he added.
Ernst spoke at a panel entitled ‘How technologies will change content: Creation, Consumption, and Distribution’. The futurism symposium opened on Monday and is scheduled to run through Wednesday, with representatives of over 100 countries in attendance.
The Channel One head has been known to make sweeping cultural claims. Speaking at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) last year, Ernst described the US movie industry as having devolved into producing “garbage” for “infantile” audiences over the past 15 years.
Cellphones were widely adopted around the world by the end of the 1990s. The iPhone was the first mobile phone model to feature a touch-screen interface, eliminating the keypad. Other tech companies quickly followed suit, with “smart phones” vastly outnumbering other models within just a few years.
Jobs died of cancer in October 2011. Apple has continued to roll out new iPhones and iPads, but has not produced another paradigm-changing piece of hardware since. His widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, has used billions of dollars from his trust to fund liberal political causes in the US.