We could see that in way less than ten years. The devil is in the certification details and the cost.

Will it be sufficient to just wire an alarm clock to the rest quarters that goes off for just about anything? That plus some "hacker proof" (yeah right) remote control to the existing autopilot? If the auto throttles quit and the alarm got a sleeping pilot to the controls before anything bad happened, does that flight now have to divert because the crew will time out because their rest was interrupted?

It can technically be "done" quite easily, depending on your definition of do (or it). But it can't be done cheaply while still providing the same level of monitoring, intervention and crisis response times. And all for what, saving 2 pilots hourly costs? Even considering total compensation hourly costs, I can't see them being anywhere near 10 years from something like that with the same level of safety, reliability and cost.

Who knows, maybe Fred Smith hates pilots so much he's willing to fall on his sword to throw belly containers of thousand dollar bills at something like this long before its truly cost ready just to say he does it. But with increasing margin pressures that are challenging otherwise solid volumes and the era of dual subsidized meglomaniac foreign carriers about to capacity dump on them as fast as Boeing and Airbus can crank them out, I'm not seeing how that segment can afford to screw around with something like that in the next 10 years.

Sounds like NASA's wanna be Mars mission timelines. We choose to do it not because it is easy but because it is hard, nothing to fear but fear itself, rah rah rah whatever, but the budget can't even come close to handeling it because we're just not there yet.