I'm totally in favor of the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. But if a non-human agent had been one of those participants, does that subtract from the value of the result? I don't think so.

>It will be a truly sad world if we automate this away.

In my opinion, research can't be fully automated because the space of possible problems is too large. You need humans to decide which problems are worth spending time on, and to evaluate which results are important. We might expect AI to automate some of the routine aspects like searching for counter-examples or formalizing proofs, but that will free up resources for humans to focus on the big ideas and the direction of research.