The use of the term "autopilot" is particularly cute here, because any pilot who's ever used one knows that autopilots are dumb as rocks, can't really be truste

The use of the term "autopilot" is particularly cute here, because any pilot who's ever used one knows that autopilots are dumb as rocks, can't really be trusted, and don't do nearly as much as non-pilots tend to assume they do. "You go that way, at this altitude, until I tell you to do something different" is what most of them manage, and they do it well enough. Some of the high end ones have navigational features you can use ("Follow this GPS route or VOR radial"), and in airliners, they can do quite a bit, but you still are very closely monitoring during anything important. "In the middle of the sky," yeah, you've got some time to figure things out if George goes wonky. During a Cat III ILS approach down to minimums, you have two trained pilots, paying full attention to just what this bit of computer is doing, both prepared to abort the approach and head back into the middle of the sky with an awful lot of thrust behind them if anything goes wrong. But in cruise, there's just not too much that requires an instant response.