Semi-automation (human in the loop) can still result in a dramatic uplift in productivity. You can't run a combine harvester 100% autonomous but that doesn't stop anyone from trying to get as close to that limit as possible.
I'm curious why you think that.
Refueling? Seems solvable. Tornadoes? Not directly solvable, but, no less so than for humans.
There’s infinite complexity, sure, but that’s why it’s silly to try and hop to done. One step at a time.
One step at a time is what is happening and the improvement and rate of improvement is crazy as we see,
A whole class of nontechnical people don’t accept anything but “fully solved including every possible edge case” before they call it done, then complain that they didn’t prepare socially for what happens when that is true.
Similar to problem to how 100% autonomous vehicles don’t exist, yet. There are too many edge cases.
Get to 99% first.
Precision Agriculture stuff is utterly crazy these days, other than fuel the remaining staff is the only thing left where you can get efficiency improvements - and at the scale of modern megafarms, even small percentages add up to a ton of money.
You essentially said: you’re wrong, it is autonomous when it doesn’t need a human during one specific part of its overall usage.
During the time that actually matters economically. The time to drive the harvester to/from your typical US mega-field is minuscule compared to the time it can run all on its own.