[fn-mote]

Absurd. 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.

[rcxdude]

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.