The development of engineered systems having properties of autonomy and intelligence has been a visionary research goal of the twentieth century. However, there are a number of persistent and fundamental problems that continue to frustrate this goal. Behind these problems is an outmoded industrial foundation for the contemporary discourse and practices addressing intelligent robotics that must be superseded as engineering progresses more deeply into molecular and biological modalities. These developments inspire the proposal of a paradigm of engineered synthetic intelligence as an alternative to artificial intelligence, in which intelligence is pursued in a bottom-up way from systems of molecular and cellular elements, designed and fabricated from the molecular level and up. This paradigm no longer emphasizes the definition of representation and the logic of cognitive operations. Rather, it emphasizes the design of self-replicating, self-assembling and self-organizing biomolecular elements capable of generating cognizing systems as larger scale assemblies, analogous to the neurobiological system manifesting human cognition.