The pilotless craze that's hit the military has done so for a few specific reasons: removing the pilot saves weight, reduces the requirements for life support systems (pressurization, O2, etc) and removes the issue of casualties. Those benefits don't apply to pax aircraft. The only benefit to pax aircraft is saving $ on training and salaries.

But don't think something else won't take up those savings. As someone else pointed out, there will always be an operator of some type somewhere. Whether they sit in the airplane and babysit or are located in a central location, those people still need to be trained how to get the airplane from A to B without killing everyone. And the computer and programming reliability will have to be spot-on perfect to avoid liability.

I worked around military unmanned aircraft for a bit and the reality hit me that no matter how much the tech pundits keep saying it'll happen, the technology is no where near reliable enough to put people on unmanned airplanes, specifically a flying public that is already suspicious of airline management practices. We lost unmanned aircraft (MQ-1/9s) with alarming regularity. Leaving prepared surfaces on taxi/takeoff/landing happened all the time...landing short, botched landings resulting in gear failures, engine failures, lost link...the list goes on. That's fine and all if you've got a camera on board, but with 100+ people?

I can foresee pilots being relegated to simply monitoring systems. But completely pilotless airliners? Too much liability and you really wouldn't be saving that much anyways.