The day they can get Windows 9X/200X to run without the risk of crashing is the day I'll be worried about fully-computerized airplanes. Just my 2 cents.

Scott,

IMHO I don't think the comparisons with military technology are valid because the bottom line of a military program is that the aircraft is expendable. If it all goes wrong, you crash the thing somewhere remote and if theres a person on board they eject. Its this philosophy which allows the technology to reach an acceptable level of safety and reliability. In the case of a commercial aircraft there's no escape system, which means that you either have to design and certify for every possible eventuality, which is impossible, or you have to decide what level of risk to design to and accept that anything beyond that will lead to the loss of the aircraft. I wouldn't want to be defending that decision in court when you lose the first aircraft. Someone did mention previously the use of neural networks by the military. Again, this still relies on having an expendable aircraft with an ejection system. Neural networks are not precise things, just like the human brain. They do have some latent ability to learn, but only so much and when thats used up their performance goes downhill rapidly. They can produce varying , unpredictable results from the same input data, and just lke the human brain they can sometimes do something totally bizarre and unexpected. This form of technology is definitely not mature enough to be used in any form of safety critical application!

Thanks for everyone's ideas. I wish I had more to contribute to the discussion myself, but as mentioned in the original post, I'm only at training for my private and my knowledge of the industry is nowhere near enough to guess at how/if/when companies would try to bring in fully-automated computer flight systems.

Seems to me that I won't have to worry too much about being made obsolete. Security concerns, the limitless possibilities of things that can go wrong and possibly not accounted for in code, lifespan of aircrafts, and public unwillingness to fly an unmanned aircraft probably make the job of a human pilot fairly secure for a fair while anyway. I do wonder about the nature of the job that I would face in ten or twenty years time still.