Visions of the future
Does anyone remember seeing programmes like Tomorrow's World and the like? Back in the seventies we imagined we'd go to work in a suspended monorail module, there would be regular flights to a base on the moon, supersonic flight would be routine and we would all be served at home by a humanoid robot like C3PO!
As I said before "never say never" but predictions about the future were often horrendously inaccurate. Of course technology has advanced but often where we didn't envisage it. I used to work on a mainframe computer that had a storage unit that was the size of a large bookcase. It had a ferrite core and 512k of memory. The processing power, storage capabilities and the Internet have revolutionised our way of living. However, in terms of autonomous systems I imagine that we will see UAVs being allowed into mainstream airports in a "mixed mode" and I suspect that is where a lot of the research is going. However, the sheer complexity of decision making on a typical flight to say a busy airport where the presence of storms means traffic is being vectored all over the place and then diverting etc makes for an incredibly complex situation to model.
I imagine the autonomous systems would rely on a rule set, devised by a possibly fallible human, but we (humans) use judgement, experience, knowledge and we can learn. As someone said before any aircraft will HAVE to be remotely accessible eg in the case of a reroute so fully autonomous (probably) isn't feasible. I understand why the military value UAVs but there are far more questions than answers as to the desirability of such aircraft. I hope the aircraft designers will do all they can to put humans back into loop not take them out of it.