Isn’t Airbus starting up Project Dragonfly to augment pilots with AI/ML and augmented reality to assist with flight?In sufficiently developed applications, AI/ML can out-perform humans in ordinary tasks that closely resemble its training scenarios. Yet as soon as AI/ML encounters a real-world situation that is outside its training, all bets are off. Its performance becomes poor and unpredictable. That's when you need humans who have situational awareness and actually understand what they are doing. Yet the problem is that these situations are not predictable - they happen quickly and unexpectedly, so you don't have much time to identify it and get a human to take over.
Put differently, one could say that the reason we have human pilots is to turn off the automation and fly the airplane, when it becomes necessary. But to do that effectively, those humans need experience and training, so they might as well be there all the time flying the airplane and using automation as appropriate to reduce their workload.
I personally feel unless you’ve taken flight lessons, built a home simulator to play Microsoft Flight Simulator or stepped foot as a non-flying person in an actual airliner simulator, the closest thing many will experience to flying an airplane when it comes to task loading, being aware of the environment around them and being safe would be scuba diving. Yes - there are similar concepts in skydiving and hang gliding but the tasks one must do underwater to survive and not earn a trip to a decompression chamber or the morgue is crucial.