From DSSs to cooperative systems: some hard problems still remain

We review the main concepts put forward by the designers of joint cognitive systems and cooperative systems. We claim that all these systems, as well as decision support systems, stumble on the same difficulties related to man-machine cooperation. Apart from technical difficulties coming from present computer inabilities and from psychological or sociological problems, we show that despite the efforts to enrich representations and models, and to understand cooperation, the remaining weaknesses of all the systems from DSS to cooperative systems are due to insufficient representation flexibility, lack of knowledge self-acquisition and learning and finally, lack of adaptability