'Both Boeing and Airbus make very good and clever aeroplanes, that can basically fly themselves all the time. Albeit each with some gotchas. They have to make them clever and highly automated.
Why?
Because there would otherwise not be enough sufficiently experienced and competent pilots to fly the worlds aircraft. Imagine nothing but a fleet of 727 or A300 equivalent technology aircraft flying the globe today. There would be major crashes every week.'
Be nice if I could figure out how to highlight and quote other peoples post's properly !
Anyway, disagree with the above although I've heard that argument many times.
In the absence of a strong Airline culture that encourages, even mandates a steady diet of manual flying I think that if automation technology had remained fairly basic, especially in the Airbus case then we wouldn't have a generation of pilots so dependent on it and in turn their basic flying skills would be much sharper.
Think of how many accidents have taken place because of pilots not understanding the automation or misusing it in a crisis / flight instrument failure.
Increased automation just turned many pilots into drones unfortunately.