Well said "the ability to make decisions in a dynamic environment".

One of my pet peeves is when friends/family/people ask me about the autopilot or automation in general.. There is a true perception that we are pretty much doing nothing but watching the autopilot do its thing...
I sometimes use the analogy of vehicle cruise control that does a great job maintaining speed in the car but has no idea that it is running up on another vehicle...if you were the only vehicle on the road or the only aircraft in the sky there would be no issue....unfortunately there are hundreds of decisions to be made every flight because it is a dynamic environment.... obviously self driving vehicles have gone well beyond cruise control but the artificial intelligence required to fly a plane will require exponentially more factors to be considered than driving a 2 dimensional land based vehicle like a train or car...

Now that I've said that we can all be amazed when some 12 year old kid from the Midwest comes out with prototype software next year..... Speaking of which, I wish that same kid would focus on an improvement to PBS first....