Abandon those, and you will watch black boxes take off without you within 20 years.
Unfortunately we're not that far removed as it is now.
I suspect whether we like it or not, it will be the reality in 20 years.
I'm fortunate to be flying a machine presently that requires good situational awareness and basic flying skills, because there's a lot the airplane just won't do for you...which in my view is as it should be. I come from a crop dusting, hands-on, background, and I see hands-on skills as important, be it stick and rudder or instrument flying. However, I do see what I'd deem to be a significant decrease in stick skills today, and with increasing automation, perhaps an over reliance upon automation.
A few years ago I saw a report on the TV about an aircraft upset involving a regional turbopropeller airplane. The description sounded somewhat like a tailplane stall, with reports of a roll to the inverted and a nose down pitch of 30-45 degrees. I was absolutely horrified to see the captain on that flight be interviewed live, and say (I kid you not) that the airline needed to seek better instruments because "my instruments gave me no meaningful information." He was upset, and rather than keep shut and appear the fool, he proverbially opened his mouth and removed all doubt. He admitted, live on national television, that he couldn't read his instruments during the upset, and said he couldn't figure out which way was up.
I shudder to imagine that one day any of my family might be on a flight commanded by someone such as this, or even that someone such as this managed to pass one or more checkride. Yet he did. Worse, he became a captain. He did so in a company where the choices were among those who bought their jobs, who attended a school run by the airline, and subsequently went to work...so the airplanes were staffed by inexperienced pilots who knew nothing outside what they'd been told in a classroom...having been taught by other inexperienced pilots.
I refer to this as the "heritage of inexperience," and it's rife throughout the industry today. We've just come from one of the largest hiring booms in the history of the industry, on a global scale, and we see a lot of pilots in seats what have never proven themselves. Pilots who've never actually experienced an emergency outside a simulator, who refer to their seniors in respectful tones such as "dude," and upon reflection of the miracle of aviation are inspired to say "way cool." A crowd that's affectionately referred to in the cockpit as "children of the magenta line."
I flew with one a few years ago. Never mind partial panel. Cover up his EHSI display, and take away the map, and he couldn't navigate to save his life, let alone fly a straight line. I forwarded a letter to the chief pilot recommending his dismissal...as did every other Captain I knew. He eventually busted out of a recurrent...didn't make it through the oral in the ground school...but he should never have been there in the first place. I watched him get lost, completely disoriented, five times in the traffic pattern on a VMC night...with me bugging him around using the magic magenta line....he was that bad.
The same kid, one night out of Tampa, engaged the yaw damper on me before I asked. He did it about the same time as we got some wake turbulence, and while I was trying to use the rudders, the airplane was trying to prevent it. I kicked the yaw damp off, and he reached up and reset it. I told him to leave it alone...he didn't understand, didn't listen. He didn't understand why someone would want to fly the airplane instead of turning the airplane over to the automation and hoping the automation would handle it.
Yes, they're out there. I can only hope that they are few, and in the minority. With or without them, however, I suspect that the time is fast approaching when pilots will be relegated to observers rather than participants.