With respect, fellow posters, I think most of you have been dragged off on a red herring hunt by the esteemed 'Carruthers'.
'Wiley', in his excellent post that started this long thread wasn't bemoaning the advent of a crewless airliner - he was trying to sound a timely warning that the way things are going, the airline flight crew will become more and more merely monitors, untrained or not kept current in the skills required to manually override the automatics. (I just remembered that "Wiley's" original post is on another thread and that 'Croozin' linked this thread to in his original post.)
If we got back to that argument, I for one agree with "Wiley" that that day is far closer than I'm comfortable with.