Since you are questioning the judgement of pilots based on their expertise, I am going to present my qualifications:
I am a private pilot with an instrument rating and over 900 hours and 23 years of experience. I was also an AI researcher in the first half of my career. I wrote my Ph.D. thesis on how to build autonomous vehicles that would navigate through natural terrain (I did this while working for NASA on the research program that led up to the first Mars rover mission). I was also the PI for the Remote Agent Executive [1], which controlled the first (and to my knowledge still only) fully autonomous interplanetary spacecraft. So I think I'm about as qualified as a person could be to make the following judgement: I would absolutely not fly in a fully autonomous spacecraft. No fucking way. I have no doubt that they would work fantastically well >99% of the time as long as everything was going to plan. But I don't want to be in the aircraft the one time that something goes wrong that the system is not equipped to handle, and watch my life slip away watching the aircraft doing something stupid because some minimum wage sub-contractor in Asia forgot to put a semicolon in the right place.
And I don't think you need to be an expert to realize that full autonomy is a Really Bad Idea. All you have to do it look at how the 737MAX MCAS debacle is unfolding. MCAS was autonomy writ very, very small, and 346 people are dead.