Beaker
Not taking a position on this pro or con, just pointing out the potential cost benefits:
It takes roughly 4 full time pilots/seat to crew an aircraft - at ~£200k/year that's over a million dollars per aircraft per pilot. That's a recurring cost - so ~$25 million per aircraft over the life of the aircraft (more when you factor in benefits into the salary).
Developing the s/w and h/w to automate out a pilot is not recurring (aside from some support costs as the s/w gets periodically updated. Build 1,000 aircraft with the feature that eliminates one pilot and you're talking $25 Billion in savings to the operators. That would pay for a pretty robust development program with plenty left over in the profit column...
40 years ago, while Boeing was developing the 767, the FAA released a study that showed that there was no safety improvement between a 2 crew and a 3 crew flight deck. Boeing had made the 2 crew EICAS equipped flight deck an option with a price tag of a little under $1 million. With one exception, all the launch customers quickly changed their orders to the 2 crew EICAS configuration - at the time they quoted the payback in pay/benefits as less than 2 years.
In short, eliminating crew costs is a big carrot...