Yeah I've never seen an increase in automated testing have the effect of laying off testers. Usually it results in testers moving up the food chain a bit: they get involved with the automation, help with things like CI integration, and find more time to devote to test strategies, documentation, etc.
That was one of my points as well. Our testers weren’t technicians flipping switches. They were engineers and computer scientists who designed test cases, maintained them, ran them, and analyzed the results. I wanted to free them from running the test cases (which could take weeks when the full suite was executed) so they could do more of the rest.
