Paper short abstract:

Legal rights and moral principles are becoming matters of engineering. Dissolving institutional and disciplinary boundaries is turning the making of trading zones into imperatives. This shifts innovation away from traditional legitimacy centres and tests the critical currency of STS concepts.

Paper long abstract:

Policy elites, technoscience and innovation networks push hard to overcome ontological, disciplinary and institutional boundaries between epistemic regimes, such as those of science and law. Existing "silos" have to be broken down and re-directed towards policy challenges and making new markets. Delicate intermediary trading zones between such practices are then transformed into imperatives of an emerging median estate, and legal-technical hybrids turned into business opportunities for entrepreneurs. This contribution focuses on two cases of such trading zones in ICT-driven fields, where legal rights and moral principles become matters of engineering, design and risk management. First, practices of 'privacy by design' aim to hardcode fundamental rights into information infrastructures. Second, coding moral principles into robots is quickly moving from science fiction to a real concern for engineering and robo-ethics. These developments slowly shift the seat of articulation for legal and ethical principles away from traditional sites, to contexts of interdisciplinary innovation coalitions. Trading zones and hybrids move from the periphery to the intermediary region "between" institutional and disciplinary "silos" like policy, law, ethics, science and technology development. Instead they become new centres of jurisdiction ordering their respective roles and contributions. These developments pose important questions for STS. Do concepts like 'hybridity', 'network', or 'trading zones' still have enough critical currency when they become normalized states of things, considering these concepts were instrumental in producing this situation? Or do we need more focus on constitutive and constitutional dimensions, by inquiring into disconnections and checks & balances in ecologies of different knowledge practices?