[pjlegato]

You are correct that automation would help out a lot technically, at least in some science fields.

There are two cultural issues, though:

1) Automation won't be used in many cases since automation is not how the advisors did things when they got their PhD. They usually don't care if the student has a better idea for how to do things than theirs, even (especially) if the student is technically correct.

2) Even in cases where they do automate some procedure and save a lot of labor, the grad student is simply expected to use that time to do that much more new / additional work.

[sseagull]

Exactly. They will be put to work figuring out how to automate thing, and we will be back to where we started.

In order to automate something, you have to actually discover and refine the process first