No. Definitely No. While some senior DoD political appointees talked out of their arses about unmanned tacair a few years ago, both USN and USAF are starting 6th gen fighter programs and both are manned.

The only real benefits to be gained are slightly better endurance and higher G's. But you if you really need a 15 G dogfighter, you can have an AP mode that pulls the turn and takes the shot and then gives the jet back to the pilot when he wakes up. Never say dogfighting is dead but most future a2a combat (and recent historical examples) involve missiles at longer range. Reality is that AI type advances will be used to augment human pilot capabilities, the human may become battle-manager, adult supervision, and installed backup. But he'll still be there.

The risks are legion. We don't have AI that can adapt on the fly so if they bad guys figure out how to defeat it they'll have a window of opportunity to do a lot of damage. Hacking, jamming are more significant issues. A human can go into autonomous lone wolf mode but that would be very risky to let automation do that. There are also major unresolved ethical, political, and legal issues.

The ONLY way this is happening in the near future is if somebody else does it and succeeds... we might conceivably need to react to that. But there's only two players of concern and we generally know what they're up to.

Mil is exploring unmanned cargo in the TACTICAL realm. They are not even REMOTELY considering unmanned airlift in the real world, for all the same reasons that airlines aren't.

There is no consideration for unmanned aircraft with pax on board, except for battlefield medevac where the only other option is to die while waiting.


Future generations may well be less inclined to travel because they have more entertainment options at home. But population growth and increasing affluence will probably more than offset that. I would anticipate that living one's life primarily in a VR world would be the province of the dregs of society.

Home 3D printers will work for some things (like a spatula), but not for any of the highly complex consumer products (particularly anything with embedded digital computers) which we take for granted. The technology to 3D print something like a computer monitor at home is centuries away. That's comparable to leaping from hammering out iron horseshoes to making a titanium jet engine N2 core in your garage.