This is already happening all over the world across multiple industries. It's typically called lab-in-the-loop. I have been involved in projects with eccentri

This is already happening all over the world across multiple industries. It's typically called lab-in-the-loop. I have been involved in projects with eccentric billionaires to build such things. It's challenging to make forward progress in a meaningful way (IE, beyond a press-and-paper prototype), and often the reasons are entirely banal and provincial (many scientists in the field feel threatened by ML and automation; others just don't know how to work in a large-scale environment, others want to come up with the perfect experiment yet never actually run one, and even others want to use the automater as a quick-turn-around, not economy-of-scale tool. Further, just getting the necessary support infra to make the system run well can often be quite challenging.