Tacit Knowledge and Automation: An Ethnographic Account of Retail Banking in India

• In Event: Automation, Skill and Identity in an Age of AI - II

Abstract

Both recent (McKinsey 2017) and historical discourses (Marx 1867, Zuboff 1988) on automation technologies show their potential to alter the nature of work, albeit within the broader framework of recursive relationship between humans, machines and organisations. Macroeconomic forecasts that predict significant changes in the job market due to diffusion of AI-based automation technologies in recent times, assume mutual exclusivity between cognitive and repetitive activities in a job role (Autor et al 2003, David et al 2013). However, the role of tacit knowledge (Polanyi 1966) as an integral component of performing activities is often overlooked when cognition & repetition are taken to be binary in nature. Moreover, activities that require skills which are tacit in nature (sensorimotor: common sense, judgement, intuition, creativity), and which cannot be enunciated using explicit “rules” or procedures, have been the most challenging aspects while introducing automation technologies in a job role (Moravec 1988). In this paper, drawing on ethnographic research, we map the role of tacit knowledge in conducting activities associated with everyday practices of a cashier in a public sector bank in India. We capture the interaction between human actors & (automation) technologies in performing day-to-day activities in the backdrop of the formal organisational structures in the retail banking ecosystem. While unravelling people’s everyday interaction with technology within a organizational setting, we aim to connect our findings to the larger debate on the current phase of automation and its implications for the changing nature of work.

Authors

• Soumyo Das, International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore

• Bidisha Chaudhuri, International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore