This bothers me. Here we have a flyable aircraft with an incapacitated crew. A CLEVER aircraft full of computers. It knows it's cabin altitude and it's altitude. It's got a terrain database. It's got a GPWS. It can tell if it's been suddenly depressurized. It's under control. But it can't automatically fly itself down to a safer altitude and then avoid terrain on autopilot?
Same as AF447. The aircraft KNOWS it's got a great chunk of weather in front of it. It should be expecting turbulence and icing and prepare itself for possible associated problems such as temporary loss of airspeed sensors.
In November a 321 relied solely on aoa info and dived the plane down. What about crosschecking with Inertial input and GPS input? Again, half a job of automation.
The systems people need to widen their view and concentrate not just on the minutiae of up down left and right but on the big picture.