Agreed, my girlfriend has a biochemistry degree and works in such a lab. It involves some physical work like collecting, preparing and inputting samples, doing basic maintenance of the machines, some analysis and then some administrative/secretarial work in feeding the results into a system or by phonecall to the doctor.
All of which can indeed be automated in my view.
I would say it really depends on where you are though. In the US it probably makes sense quite quickly. But she lives in a small EU country where salaries aren't high, and this is very much a junior position with a lot of students looking for such a job. Her position costs about 25k a year.
The NPV of a $1m investment with a 25k cashflow is negative at normal discount rates. Once you get to replace a $120k salary with a $1m robot, it does make sense.
Further I do still expect there to be some jobs in overseeing the robot (e.g. your average factory manager). That makes sense for large centralised production locations, because you can have 1 human job overseeing many robots. It doesn't necessarily make sense with many small decentralised production locations. And that's the nature of most labs, I believe due to the time sensitivity of a lot of lab work they need to be everywhere and close to customers. But maybe that will change.
All of which can indeed be automated in my view.
I would say it really depends on where you are though. In the US it probably makes sense quite quickly. But she lives in a small EU country where salaries aren't high, and this is very much a junior position with a lot of students looking for such a job. Her position costs about 25k a year.
The NPV of a $1m investment with a 25k cashflow is negative at normal discount rates. Once you get to replace a $120k salary with a $1m robot, it does make sense.
Further I do still expect there to be some jobs in overseeing the robot (e.g. your average factory manager). That makes sense for large centralised production locations, because you can have 1 human job overseeing many robots. It doesn't necessarily make sense with many small decentralised production locations. And that's the nature of most labs, I believe due to the time sensitivity of a lot of lab work they need to be everywhere and close to customers. But maybe that will change.