You (and I) prefer to keep the pilots there, but still, there's a push to need only one person and not two in that plane/cockpit. I have little to no doubt we'll have to relearn some hard lessons after we've AI'd up pilots.
$1 per passenger is huge! For Ryanair it's 200m annually.
The problem with that is most skills need to be practiced. When you only need to use your skills unexpectedly in an emergency, that may not end well. Same applies to other fields where AI can do something 95% of the time, with human intervention required in the 5% case. Is it realistic to expect humans to continue to fill that 5% gap if we allow our skills to wane by outsourcing the easiest 95% of a job and only keep the hardest 5% for ourselves.
Have you ever managed people?
Richard de Crespigny, who flew the Quantas A380 that blew one of its engines after a departure from Changi, explains very clearly and in a gripping way the amount of stuff happening while trying to save an aircraft.
Lots of accidents happen today already at the seams of automation, I don't think we're collectively ready for a world with much more automation, especially in the name of more shareholder value of a 4 dollars discount.
The Air France Rio-Paris crash is a good example of sudden full mistrust of automation and sensors by the crew after a sensor failure appeared and then recovered. Very, very sad transcript and analysis... I'm arguing against myself here, singe it was also a huge case of crew management failure and it might not have gone to crash with only one person in the cockpit.
So yes, we keep pilots, but we keep _fewer_ pilots.