How many high speed rail systems have you seen or heard that do. It have an operator up front?

Shinkansen does. The Chinese systems do. All they have to do is go forward and occasionally backward.

When those are replaced with HAL9000, and autonomous mass transit in general, then you’ll see it in aviation in a few decades.

I won’t be on an airplane without a pilot. I trust them to be just as reliable as the engineers that designed them.