Many years ago, a friend of my father told a story about the first automated airplane.  Boarding passengers were treated to the following announcement:  "You are boarding an XXX250, the world's first automated airplane.  There are no pilots but the quadruple redundant computers cannot fail.  This airplane is foolproof.......foolproof........foolproof........foolproof."

A bit more recently but still a while ago, I was at Boeing asking about a head's-up display for use in bad weather landings and whether Boeing was going to make it available on its new 737.  The engineers were unanimous in confirming the effectiveness of the system but very noncommittal about whether Boeing would put it on the options list.  Finally, one of the engineers took me aside and said:  "Boeing will never say this officially but the statistics show that, while the average airline pilot makes a fatal landing error every 100,000 landings, a modern autoland system will malfunction only once every 1,000,000 landings.  It follows that the less the pilots have to do with the landing, the safer the airplane is."

For myself, I think technology is great but I would not personally want to be in an airplane in which the pilot did not have the last word in ALL situations.  It is an interesting thought as I am contemplating the purchase of avionics that will provide me with little green boxes to fly through to wherever the computer thinks I should be going.