I've (well my employers have) benefitted from increased technological capacity in small labs, and the throughput of technicians has easily tripled in the last 10 years, having done these tasks first hand I can tell you with confidence why there will always be a number of technicians in the process (besides equipment maintenance and repair): the people requesting lab work have no idea what they want, even in specialized fields. Maybe 10% of the people who interact with me can tell me the names of the analysis/materials they need without hand holding.
It would be great if I could just do maintenance and keep the lab running, then I would be worried about losing my job to a.i. and contractors. But until the other people in the company get smarter about what the lab does, I'm not worried at all.