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The act of controlling a plane can be done entirely by looking at gauges, but that's not the only thing a pilot does. Pilots are also interfacing with ATC, flight attendants, dispatch, maintenance, and passengers. Even if you replace these interfaces with a computer usable format, you still need someone with judgment and responsibility for the flight. Pilots exercise their judgment over the information they receive from these other sources, and to coordinate these resources for efficient, safe flight. It's a huge challenge to replace all of this with a system.

[usrusr]

I don't disagree at all. If you automated all the controls you'd still have some form of plane manager.

Perhaps a far more meaningful automation push could be done by creating an entirely new ATC scheme with automation in the air and on the ground, designed not defuse the class of mistakes that are typical for humans but to work around weaknesses of automation while exploiting its strengths (relative to humans). I suspect that the error margins needed for one group have very little overlap with the error margins needed for the other and with the general multilevel architecture of existing ATC it should be possible to designate a subset of airspace to the new system and having then coexist.