Then perhaps Michael Bolton's rap will convince you otherwise that manual testing is an important and necessary aspect of any serious software development process:
Those are not testing feature correctness, but testing feelings.
Manual "tests" are about getting the feeling on how it works, how approachable it is etc., not about feature correctness as it is described in the funspec.
When people typically talk about automating the testing, they're talking about taking rote-based manual checks and automating them. Absolutely fine, no complaints from me.
But that's not automating "the" testing. It might be automated their testing, and those two things are different.
You can easily tell by whether they're doing it to get rid of the testers (cost-saving), or freeing up manual testers to do what they're good at: context-driven exploration of the problem space.
Manual "tests" are about getting the feeling on how it works, how approachable it is etc., not about feature correctness as it is described in the funspec.