This take is so ignorant and provably false. I can't tell if you're trying to ragebait or if you actually believe this.

The autopilot does not do "almost all critical work", not even close. It only does some of the routine work (definitely not all of it). But the real critical work is when stuff goes wrong, dealing with emergencies.

The inherent complexity of aviation means that there are so many different failure modes and combinations thereof that no traditional system could ever handle all possibilities and edge cases.

I'm not going to claim that an AI could never do it. But as of right now, with current technology, well-trained pilots are absolutely critical to safety in even the most advanced airliners.

Also, the survivorship bias argument runs against you. Most events where pilots save the day are completely invisible. Like catching an incorrect clearance, a misconfigured approach, dealing with a technical malfunction, etc.

And even when disasters happen, it is very rare that simply engaging the autopilot would have saved the day. In fact, there are plenty of examples where the opposite is the case, and dropping to a lower level of automation would, in hindsight, have been better.

Your first sentence would lead one to believe that you have some substantial evidence to demonstrate the ignorance and falsehood you identified. It's impressive that you are regurgitating the same formulaic-template set of cliches that boil down to "X is so complex bro, how can you even?".

Note that I never claimed aviation relies on AI right now, most of the Autopilot systems are deterministic automation systems, but the original point stands regardless.