Post-human and scientific research: how engineering carried out the project.

We start with a definition of robot in order to understand which are legitimate robotics' objectives. Then it is provided an outline of new robot generations and their industrial and biomedical applications. We consider the consequences of this new kind of technology on the notion of intelligence, stressing how the exteroceptive sensor systems provide a new bottom up approach to the AI debate. We consider three challenges Robotics have to face nowadays. First materials and components, which are built with technologies top-down, set huge limits in terms of weight, speed, safety and cost, not to mention reliability and durability. Second the methodological aspects: the challenge concerns the management of complexity. How to achieve intelligent and adaptive behaviours out of the control system of the robot, which must remain intrinsically simple? A third issue we address is the cultural one: the unreasonable expectations of the general public often provoked by a misunderstanding of the notion of intelligence itself. We consider then what makes human specifically human from a broader philosophic point of view, pointing out how the will is strangely absent in the AI debate. We show three advantages connected with this different perspective instead of the classical one intellect centered. First, while intellect is not used only by man, will is. Second, desire involves intellect while the reciprocal is not necessarily true. Third, looking at robotics and more specifically to cybernetics the key concept of these fields are control and governance, whereas both of them are specifically relate to the domain of will rather than intellect. We look then into the concept of participation as essential to the understanding of the notion of will, to overcome some roboethics' issues related to the adoption of the still dominant rationalistic paradigm.