Machines have a leg up on humans in more technical, repetitive, and scalable tasks, and they get to avoid the different behavioural inconsistencies that people often display. Computers are great at prolonged monitoring and detecting rare events, they perform these tasks much more precisely and reliably than humans. Their reaction time to deviations from preselected values is also much shorter and their corrections are more accurate than human's.

However, automated systems have one major drawback, which will make it hard for them to ever completely replace human pilots; and that is their incapability of coming up with solutions for new problems. Humans are unpredictable and fickle, but they are also more adept at handling unpredictability. They can be creative and innovative and use knowledge stored in their memory to solve a situation that they have never thought of before. A machine is not able to have a qualitative approach to a problem solution, while humans do.

Together, they’re an unbeatable duo.