I mentioned this on another thread some time ago but can't remember which one, the biggest thing with automation at the moment is that it is not 'complete' automation. Partial automation is a huge issue - having a pilot who's required to take over when the system $hits itself, but who otherwise sits and does nothing for hours on end - he's only there for when the going gets tough. The automation does little, if anything, to keep him in the loop, and more importantly, keep him in practice, but expects him to go from a brain-dead stupor to aviation hero in an instant.
At some point the technology will become reliable enough but it is nowhere even remotely near that right now.
As the systems improve, which they will, the point at which they fail will be further and further into the areas that make the aircraft unnecessarily harder to fly. Now, mostly, the 'system' just keeps handing over a larger and larger bag of $hit as it progresses, QF32 is a great example.
Trying to 'engineer' pilots out of the equation as much as possible by taking a lot of the day-to-day things and automating them has resulted in aircraft that are, in some situations, a lot more difficult to fly than they need to be and has also had the effect of weakening pilot skills and when it all goes south you'll need those very same now weakened skills to fix.
There is absolutely no such thing as something that cannot fail - every single day there are possibly hundreds of events around the world where the automatics fail in one form or another, and it's fixed by the pilots, who simply tidy up and continue on their way. If you stopped those fixes, remove the ability to apply those fixes or, dare I say it, adopt an 'it will never happen' attitude, it WILL start raining aluminium.