Before the inevitable "why do we even have pilots anymore" posts, let me share a story. The tldr is: we have pilots so there is a trained human for redundancy

Before the inevitable "why do we even have pilots anymore" posts, let me share a story. The tldr is: we have pilots so there is a trained human for redundancy when the automatic systems fail. My father was a pilot, first in the military then commercial. He hated flying commercial, "it's boring, most days I'm a well paid glorified bus driver, unless something goes wrong" He is since retired, but he likes to say "I only earned my paycheck once in my last 10 years flying". The story goes, they were just over the Atlantic between Maine and Iceland when there was an electrical fire that threw out some of the automation and controls. His job that day was to manually fly a piece of metal with about 200 people on board to the nearest airfield where they could land safely and do repairs. Every other day his job was to run checklists, smile, and drink coffee.