Huck;
Long haul cockpits are alot busier than you've been led to believe.
No kidding. One trip east or west through that section of the Middle East between Cypress and, say, Arar will prove that, unless "call-ahead" is no longer required!
One wonders how automation would handle the ITCZ or the millions of moment-by-moment, timely, small crew decisions that add up to thousands of eventless flights.
Computers which mimic human thought (pass the Turing test) are possible but the Philosophy of Mind still cannot describe what an 'idea' is, what a thought is, what imagination is, what possibility is or what happens in conceptualization, what the notion of "work-around" means or the phrase, "let's try this..."; these are all critical human functions required to fly an airplane, run a nuclear plant, drive a car, make friends or raise a child. A computer is a high-speed algorithmic zombie which, while can be no smarter than its programmers can be far more accurately, precisely, (and, to us, nefariously), dangerously dumb.
I may constantly defend the Airbus design but not against complacent reliance, stupidity or incompetence.
fly_antonov;
This thing will be a social bloodbath for the piloting industry, but it will come.
Were your proposals to be implemented resting upon the assumptions you state, that is not where the bloodbath would begin.
In the meantime, the piloting profession is not luddite-informed and has instead adapted readily to technological changes as they appear. Some industrial resistance will always occur but that is human nature. Resistance to reduced crews is based upon experience, not upon the need to maintain the ranks as some, including CEOs who think that long-haul augmentation is featherbedding, ignorantly state. These days I can assure you that we are at the very opposite end of the scale when it comes to numbers as the fatigue issues with which even now the US regulator (FAA) is wrestling, illustrates.
PJ2