I think that the term 'operator' will not be taken to by the pilot community; 'cruise pilots' seems to be the accepted term and some say they are already in cockpits at this moment. Their advance into the cockpits today is the source of many of the comments on the PPRUNE threads.
For twenty years the following scale has been used for levels of automation. These are often referred to as
Human IN the loop,
Human ON the loop and
Human OUT OF the loop.
Low
1 The computer offers no assistance, human must take all decisions and
actions
2 The computer offers a complete set of decision/action alternatives, or
3 Narrows the selection down to a few, or
4 Suggests one alternative, and
5 Executes that suggestion if the human approves, or
6 Allows the human a restricted veto time before automatic execution
7 Executes automatically, then necessarily informs the human, and
8 Informs the human only if asked, or
9 Informs the human only if it, the computer, decides to
10 The computer decides everything, acts autonomously, ignores the
human
High
(from Designing Human-Automation Interaction: a new level of Automation Taxonomy, a paper for Single European Sky ATM Research.
http://www.hfes-europe.org/wp-conten...14/06/Save.pdf )
Note that for much of the flight and for many if not all systems many modern aircraft are already operating at Level 9.
Ask which one you feel you are operating at in your current aircraft. Remember all the back and forth about whether your company 'allows' manual flying (Human in the loop) or insists on the automated system flying (human on the loop).
It is all down to costs. Even risk/hazard analysis is monetized as is pax acceptance. As a proportion of operating costs, reliable automation is rapidly dropping; the cost of human pilots is increasing and as many have already stated here their reliability is dropping. Fully automating aircraft is many times easier than full automation of cars.