Edouard Kleinpeter

NBIC is an acronym that stands for Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Sciences and applied Cognitive Sciences. It is usually associated with the idea of a putative convergence between these four fields of human technoscience. From the contemporary perspective, it encompasses two major meanings: as an epistemological view on scientific activity and as an agenda of how scientific research is to be pursued. In this article, we describe how this term emerged from a report published in 2003, before examining its philosophical foundations and underlying concepts, namely materialism, the notion of emergence borrowed from complex systems theory, and a certain analysis of scientific work. We then discuss how it relates to the modern practice of interdisciplinarity in science.

In this article, we analyse a concept forged by the encounter between an eighteenth century philosophical monism, Materialism, and the modern intertwining of science and technology, subsumed under the notion of “technoscience”. In particular, we show how Materialism has been enrolled as the main philosophical foundation of technoscience, since this found in the materialist monad a “natural” substantiation of a certain conception of science and innovation. We first briefly introduce both terms of the dyad separately before discussing how they relate to one another in the contemporary discourse about scientific progress, while taking a small detour via the writings of the science fiction author Iain M. Banks.

En 1996, le terme de « cobot », contraction de « robotique collaborative », apparut sous la plume de deux chercheurs américains travaillant pour l’industrie automobile. Il s’applique aujourd’hui à un nouveau champ de la recherche en robotique, la « cobotique », qui s’attache à concevoir des machines asservies ou pseudo-autonomes susceptibles d’être utilisées au sein d’un environnement humain. Le cobot se différencie donc essentiellement du robot par son absence d’autonomie puisque, par définition, il ne peut pas fonctionner sans l’action d’un opérateur. L’approche collaborative, tout en dépassant la simple « utilisation » qui pourrait être faite d’un outil, valorise le travail de l’humain et laisse présager d’une meilleure acceptabilité sociale du cobot, qui n’aurait pas pour vocation de remplacer l’homme, mais de l’épauler.