It's not simply about designing a remotely piloted/autonomous/single pilot aircraft and calling the matter settled. As it is, Boeing and Airbus can't put a conventional aircraft into service in under 10 years these days, and in Boeing's case, they can't even put new iterations of aircraft that have been around for decades into service without significant cash and time costs incurred, never mind an aircraft that doesn't have the regulatory and certification framework developed for the aircraft themselves, let alone the complete overhaul that would be necessary for the global ATC system to handle these aircraft (we don't even have nationwide CPDLC yet!), the ground handling and airport infrastructure in place to accommodate these aircraft, training programs for all involved personnel and employees and on and on. All of these would require years of testing and evaluation and proof of safety and reliability to meet or likely exceed the same standards of safety and reliability that we enjoy today. Resolving the logistical, legal, economic, public perception, labor resistance, and technological hurdles will be eye-wateringly expensive. Who is going to pay for all that? For-profit aircraft operators? For profit aircraft manufacturers? What about the cargo airlines? Have we forgotten that most cargo operators utilize fleets of old hand-me-down aircraft? How about the economics of all that combined with public perception? If too great an amount of the public is unwilling to fly on a pilotless aircraft, then it's all for nothing in a for-profit environment. I can't help but think of these high speed rail boondoggles that have cost billions of dollars, years in delays, all in attempt to build a conventional high speed train between large population centers...and we think we are going to just wake up in a year or two to skies full of pilotless heavy jets?
The military flies lots of RPAs, and in spite of the bottomless source of funding of the US Gov, still aren't even in the same universe of acceptable safety and reliability for public commercial use.
We don't have any meaningful use of autonomous/driverless surface vehicles yet. Cars? Trucks? Trains? Ships? Operating a freight train on rails, in only two directions, without humans on board...I think there is one in Australia operating on a single line, thru sparsely inhabited desert, and it came at a cost of about $1B. For a train.
True single pilot ops... Won't be a thing. You'll need the ability for zero pilots. The one pilot on board has a heart attack and kicks the bucket while at the controls, your contingency is either autonomy or remotely piloted. Would you trust your life or your family's lives on a remotely piloted aircraft? Data/network/comm/nav signals get jammed, fail, spoofed, and hacked all the time. How do you ensure the same level of safety as we have today with those weaknesses?
And of course there will also be battles with pilots and their unions fighting these measures.