Discussing the supporting role of Information Technology for human and organizational knowledge sharing

The history of technology has shown that with the advance of science almost any manual human task could also be done by a machine. This story of success gives hope for the subject area of artificial intelligence and Cognitive simulation. It is easily comprehensible that the automation of manual tasks is very successful, since it is of very obvious nature. Exactly this factor is the biggest problem in understanding cognitive processes and other products of our mind, that they are not obvious at all. AIl scientists assume that the human brain conducts tasks comparable to a digital computer and must therefore be reproducible as a computer. This view is supported by psychologists who use basic information processing models adapted from computer science to explain the human thought process (Lindsay et. al., 1977). Unfortunately, psychologists are still not completely sure of the way our mind works. We are well aware of the outcome and can predict some of them, but the working procedure behind our decisions remain a mystery. Hubert Dreyfus (Dreyfus, 1999) critically reviewed the psychological, epistemological and ontological grounded expectations of Artificial Intelligence workers. It is his conclusion that the enduring failure of AI to technologically reproduce the function of the human brain serves as empirical evidence against the Foundations of AI itself. According to the Author, it has also not been scientifically proven by the AI community that “the mind must obey a heuristic program”. In fact, psychology suggests that humans commonly make decisions without even considering the situation or their set of standards (Smith, 2003). Dreyfus proves that “arguments which are supposed to show that formalization must be possible are either incoherent or self-contradictory”. Therefore it seems to me, that the current state of the art in AI and Cognitive simulation is at the very limits of technology. For this reason it seems relevant to explore to what extend the current findings and technological solutions can be used to support the activity of the human brain, since it is not possible to replace the human brain by a computational device