Lenovo Group CTO Tolga Kurtoglu: The next 20 years will witness the fusion of three types of intelligence

Lenovo's Tech World conference caused a frenzy in the technology industry. In addition to speeches from CEOs such as NVIDIA, AMD, INTEL, META, and Microsoft, the first official public appearance of Dr. Tolga Kurtoglu, Lenovo Group's Chief Technology Officer, also received great attention in the industry. Tolga Kurtoglu previously served as CTO of HP, CEO of PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), and led Xerox Global Research institutes have strong influence in artificial intelligence, hardware, software, etc.

At the conference, Tolga Kurtoglu looked forward to the direction of development over the next 20 years. He said that future AI will be supported by three types of intelligence so that humans can make better use of their strengths.

The first is cognitive intelligence, which is how we process information, classify and give meaning to it, and how we understand the world around us. People have developed tool after tool to create information, share information, and use information. But today, people are bombarded with massive amounts of information and tools, constantly switching between various inputs and tasks, making it difficult to concentrate. What information has been processed and what hasn't been done is difficult to track. In the 21st century, the challenge people face is not to create information, but to manage it. Technological innovation will unlock a new generation of cognitive intelligence, enabling our brains to do what they do best.

In the technological boom of the past 20 or 30 years, the second type of intelligence that defines technology is sensory intelligence. For a long time, technology's ability to understand people was limited to what it told them. Yet just as I stand here, my body is sending out signals that express who I am, what my needs are, and how I am experiencing the world.

When these signals are obtained through technical means — for example, that you are tired after a long drive, that your blood sugar is low, or that your adrenaline soars in the face of thousands of people at the Lenovo Innovation and Technology Conference, these technologies can keep you safe.

Even linking technology to things we've overlooked or don't understand about ourselves can open up a world of accelerated innovation and full of opportunities — especially with the support of artificial intelligence. Looking forward to the future, intelligent technology will thrive in nurturing the physical and biological world.

The third type of intelligence—connected intelligence—truly embodies the unique strengths humans have. Humans are very good at connecting, connecting with each other, with the world around them, and with the abstract concepts that plague people. But after all, the amount of information that humans process is limited. As AI greatly enhances human processing capabilities, human superconnectivity is being amplified.

The next 20 years will be a time to witness the convergence of these three intelligences. Let's imagine a world where our cognitive focus is no longer interrupted by too much or unwanted input. We can optimize our physiological and biological conditions based on real-time feedback—for example, to protect ourselves from harm or help us reach our full potential.

People's ability to connect is limitless in any way we can imagine. Now, imagine if they all happened at the same time, these big intelligences would have merged. This means that humans are moving from the age of artificial intelligence to the era of enhanced intelligence. In a future world empowered by artificial intelligence, humans not only have digital tools, but also digital partners are with us.

These partners, we call them AI twins, will be embedded in every human experience and ready to connect, connect with you, and connect with others. An informational connection with your brain that has no time or interest to process. As well as connecting to other people's AI twins. Enhancing intelligence will enhance the potential contained in technology, and enhance and unleash human potential more comprehensively.

A critical step before achieving a true AI twin or AI partner is AI intelligence — which also happens to be the field of technology that Lenovo is focusing on.

The implementation of AI agents relies on three basic technologies, which enable the smart body to “know you”, “understand you”, and ultimately “serve you”.

In order for agents to “know you,” technology is needed to integrate multi-source and multi-modal data into a knowledge base. To make the intelligence “understand you,” you need to build an intent understanding engine and map the semantics of knowledge to tasks — that is, to link the knowledge the intelligence the agent holds to the tasks you need to complete. Finally, for an agent to “work for you,” it needs an automated task planning and execution engine that can break the task down into steps and then execute those steps without your prompting. At this point, AI changed from passive execution to active execution.

When all three pillars of technology are successfully executed, AI agents can help us transform from an app-centric technical experience — requiring access to multiple different applications and data sources to complete a single task — to an efficient user entry-centered experience. In this user portal, you no longer need to interact with multiple apps and data sources; you only need to interact with one agent.

This kind of AI is known as intelligent AI. As the next direction of AI development, it has become a hot topic in the industry today.