Razoray said "So the point of conversation should not be whether you would rather have HAL flying you around, or a Sky God from the past flying by the seat of his pants!"
That's right, and it's not. It's about over-reliance on automation in all aspects of our modern existence, not just in the air. I can't begin to tell you the damage this has done to my own specialty, physics, where people are starting to take models as reality, and to actually believe that the model is giving them direct information about the world. This has gone so far as to cause people to imagine that they've got reality licked down to the first nanoseconds of existence, and that up to 95 percent of the universe is unobservable, and all this within 100 years of discovering its most basic rules. In this toxic and neurotic environment, it's almost impossible to have a reasoned discussion - the digital universe has acquired a life of its own, and a strange religious fervor has settled over what should be the most rational and sane of investigative bodies. One fantastic whopper after another emerges from the dark vortex of neurosis that has ingested academic physics.
There is no earthly reason to have an airplane whose crew are mere stewards to some cheap pile of circuits somewhere in its chin. There is nothing wrong with using computers to help control an airplane, but from reading all this catechism of modes and laws of the FMC, I'm strongly reminded of the irreal universe of modern physics. The same deadly neurosis is sweeping over aviation under the pretense of cost savings. There is something utterly disturbing about the idea of a perfectly good, flyable airplane falling from the sky because its crew are sitting there staring at screens and processing idiotically coded error reports generated by some pimply digeratus with a belly full of fast food and soda in some tacky office who knows where? I've seen IT/software engineering/whatever buzzword you wish to use from the inside and it's ugly, and whether it's a pile of milspec engineers or a crowd of H1B slaves makes no difference.