I have always thought that I am there on the aeroplane to deal with the rare, the unexpected, the edge cases and anything that requires “thinking outside the box”. Most of the regular day-to-day stuff can be automated (I include humans following SOPs in that). My personal opinion is that many problems have their roots not in pilots or aircraft systems but in the interface between the two: we are still in the relative dark ages here using methods that were old half a century ago.
It’s normal to consider risk in terms of severity factored by likelihood of occurrence: you can accept something with pretty bad potential consequences as long as it sits way out at one end of the probability curve. If you could define an area where the results of automation were uncertain or even catastrophic, as long as that area was tiny compared with the area of competence, that would be acceptable.
As far as removing pilots completely from the equation, even now there are large autonomous drones flying missions around the globe but I don’t think they have quite the safety record that would entice many to sit on board as a paying customer.
The day will come when we have AI strong enough to give a comparable performance to a trained and experienced human in terms of air transport operations. At the moment, it would appear to be cheaper (and possibly safer) to retain the status quo. Also, by the time autonomous airliners become a reality, every other mode of transport will be similar and pretty much every job a human could do could be done as well or better by AI...