PLovett: I am not really sure who and how those UAVs are piloted. The ugly truth is that they t/o, cruise, attack and land without having a pilot on board. There are different types of UAVs, the Predator is powered by a pusher-prop and it carried out light attacks in Afghanistan. Not sure if it was used on the attack in Yemen.
Chinthe: At this point in time no one will by tickets for a pilotless transport category aircraft. But times change. I rememeber my first airline flight in 1990; FRA-JFK with Pan Am in an A300 or 310. Upon landing everybody cheered and applauded. Nowadays, this will be very unlikely unless most pax are intoxicated. If children grow up in a fully automated world, why would they see a need for a human in a cockpit? I don't want to offend anyone, but I have previously seen FS2002 "pilots" posting and replying to threads. 10 years ago this would have been unthinkable. As for multiple redundancy systems, we all know that technology has -so far - always increased power and cut weight. Jet engines, computers, etc. Who knows what we'll have in 20+ years?
seacue: There're already fully-automated two-dimensional vehicles out there - no public transport. I think that it is in either Amsterdam, Rotterdam or Hamburg. Those vehicles transport huge containers to and from the ships and the warehouses. Saw that on TV a few years ago. Don't know more about it - sorry.
Last year I read a report that engineers were working on aircrafts without windshields. Instead they were replaced by two large video screens.
This making-the-pilot-redundant development will not occur in huge steps, but in smaller ones. At the end it depends what the people (pax) are willing to accept. If a plane is developed that can outperform any human pilot in normal and abnormal preocedures, how will a society react that was raised in a virtual environment?