alt Hacker NewsAbsurd. The scientific apparatus is already automated. What are you going to do, have your humanoid robot do the pipetting when there is already a specialized machine that fills trays of 100 samples every 5 seconds? (Totally made up example.)
There might be a way to phrase the future as a tradeoff of capital expenditures; at least that argument would be worth reading about.
Most science is not automated like this in practice. You only see robotic pipetting and fluid handling when you're looking at something more like production or development or you have a truly ridiculous amount of variations to try that are otherwise extremely uniform.