Smart Governance
Humanising Automation
Project Principal Investigator(s): Bidisha Chaudhari, Janaki Srinivasan, Sachit Rao
Automation triggers the primary question : ‘’When machines learn and start to take on jobs that humans performed, where do the humans go and what skills do they have to learn and unlearn?’’ As AI techniques advance, this question of skills and employability looms large in the public and private sectors. Prior episodes of automation have indicated that humans bring tacit and explicit knowledge to their job roles with or without automation while simultaneously, automation introduces opportunities to learn new skills.
In this project, we would like to explore what kinds of skills can realistically be automated through the deployment of AI and its implications for job roles. Our research will focus on the current phase of AI-based automation to explore how human cognition, learning, and skill-building manifest themselves in job roles spanning the ‘’mundane’’ to the ‘’highly cognitive’’.
Our objectives are
1. To identify the categories of human skills that do not lend themselves well to automation,
2. To trace how de-skilling and re-skilling accompany automation, and
3. To recommend a framework for the ethical implementation of automation.
