You might discuss the loss of authority suffered by the modern airline pilot. It would fall into at least two categories.
1/ Any Tom Dick or Harry it seems, can tell the modern pilot what to do. How much fuel to carry, what sandwiches they can take on board. You get the drift.
2/ The more serious and relevant -- to your future PhD hopefully, will be the issue of computers taking over the decision making.
I used to find that electro-mechanical interactions were the most difficult part of the technical course when I changed aircraft. If this gizmo goes off line, then this micro-switch would cause valve A to be inhibited, and the result of that would be the loss of widget N. I would spend hours, re-writing the manual and drawing little diagrams, so that I could stay ahead of the game if anything untoward happened. I got known for it, and some checklists were changed as a result of my...well, protests really.
To show a pilot a screen covered in schematic diagrams...and then show it again after relay F had closed, was an exercise in futility. I could reduce a thousand line diagram to a few logic boxes and then show the action with sweeping colored arrows. After years learning electronics, I couldn't follow the pilot's hand-outs.
I knew that my colleagues were learning by wrote. I've deleted what I thought of that! They had to know what was the real affect on the systems when something happened, and they had to know quickly, and with a clarity born of good teaching. I could impart more true understanding in an hour in the hangar, than a day in the classroom.
These days we don't need nearly as many micro, (or even torque-switches,
) -- because software is king. Almost all modern electronics is based on dedicated programmable chips. They are made for the job, and the soft is written to cover all eventualities. Yeah, right!
The big question these days, is just how much detail can the modern pilot cope with and how much must he or she trust a vast chain-reaction of changes, in the event of a failure?
It's a huge subject, and one that is evolving without due concern for the pilot's authority.