I work in automotive too, and I work with engineers who work on self-driving vehicles. The state of the art has progressed a lot since robots were introduced into plants 40 years ago. But that being said, there are a lot of limitations to self-driving cars and there are ways dangerous people can spoof them and cause havoc if they wanted to. That's why I am in no hurry to buy such a vehicle yet. I am also aware of techniques people can use to hack into vehicles and do horrible things like apply the brakes.
In fact, and I reported this to people in my company, my vehicles radio and the display was hacked about 5 or 6 years ago while driving into work. My company now employs a security module to prevent things like that from occurring. Its pretty distracting to a driver when someone remotely gains control of your radio and display unit. That itself can cause an accident.
Things could be worse in a combat drone if someone is able to hack into the network and even only mildly spoof the humans that are in the loop.
If what I see in the industry is the state of the art for the nation, then we are a long way away from "robot" aircraft that can fight other aircraft in the modern chaotic battle-space. All we need is for a drone to shoot down some friendlies because IFF wasn't working correctly and the friendlies fit the algorithm of the bad guys. Or just as bad, a drone doesn't fire on the bad guys because IFF wasn't working and they slip through to fire on the good guys or drop bombs on our troops or hit a ship.
Really hope the USAF isn't serious about no more manned fighters at this point in time. Spend the extra 10% on life support and leave a human in the chair for now.
Maybe they should finally field something like an X-47 for A2G and incrementally work towards flying terminators. Right now all we have a couple of hellfire missile trucks remotely controlled in Nevada that are nothing more than giant expensive toys I can see in the park, and a few recon platforms.
