Even cattle trucks have drivers.
Getting the human driver out of motor vehicles is a far more challenging exercise than getting pilots out of airliners.
... I would love to see the faces of future pax when they board a pilotless plane !!!!
The passengers would know in advance, and think nothing of it.
Also. controlling the aircraft from the ground will obviously be via satellite links which from experience so far with CPDLC operations can not be relied on
No "controlling", just monitoring, with a touch of "intervention" once in a blue moon.
It's all in the up/down links.
As for the weather concerns, I imagine that all airborne aircraft would be continuously downlinking their weather and radar data to enable the computers on the ground to maintain a continuous, high resolution 3D model of the weather. Supplementing the airborne data would be satellite observations and the odd strategically placed ground station.
The weather model would be continuously uplinked to all the aircraft, of course, and weather avoidance would most probably be better than it is today.