Honestly, as far as flying goes, we will always need a human pilot and we would be wise to keep at least one on board at all times. Artificial Intelligence can be coerced and manipulated by outside agents or by the AI itself. I believe that going forward in all AI endeavors it will be wise to keep fail-safe mechanisms supervised by humans.

It's one thing to have automated cars, going and coming along a two-dimensional plane, taking them up in the air as the article states may be feasible but still a stretch unless another technology is invented. People forget that we still have wind and weather. Cars are made aerodynamically to stick to the ground thereby eliminating most of the effects of bad weather. Making things fly is a different beast, even with some form of hovering technology, not to mention that in a three-dimensional plane, there are all sorts of things one can crash into.

These companies are jumping the gun, first, bring out these self-driving cars and let us see how their implementation is received by the general public, as well as their effectiveness. I'm sure there will be some kinks to work out.

The aerospace industry should really focus on bringing the costs of energizing the motors in planes down by developing the utilization alternative fuel sources. Then we should work on air travel speed, all the while working on increasing safety. This is what the general public would love, they would love to safely arrive at their destination faster than they do now for a bit less money in a safe manner, in aircraft that pollute less, even if their aircrew continually does less and less because when you start feeling that little turbulence at 4 am while crossing the Atlantic Ocean the last thing you want is some AI whispering in the intercom to relax and that everything will be fine. Nothing beats your aircrew having some skin in the game as well.

I'm with Elon Musk on this one, one day we will come to learn that certain forms of Artifical Intelligence will be capable of terrorism as well and when that happens I wouldn't want to be the airline holding that bag of planes. We should thread these new waters safely.