I don't see the economic pressure pushing for that.
To first order, the bigger a vehicle is the less you worry about the cost of the pilot/driver. The biggest untold story in aviation is the battle between the pilots of small "regional aircraft" vs "mainline aircraft", the former of which generate less value for the same amount of work and necessarily get paid less. Unions have enforced "scope clauses" that have prevented a new generation of slightly larger regional aircraft which could lower costs at small airports and have no trouble getting filled as those lower costs get passed on to consumers. As it is small airports are dying out, harming smaller cities and towns and giving the "left behind" all the more reason to lash out.
Similarly there is a lot of a talk of crisis in truck driving, both at the local and long-haul levels. My brother-in-law has a CDL and he is always talking about how inexperienced drivers seem to wedge their trucks on a bridge in Binghamton once a month, stall out on the highway and get into accidents, etc.
This is true for so many things - even driverless taxis, drone deliveries, even office jobs / AI.
The narrative is that human labor is expensive super expensive, there are "skills shortages", etc etc... but in actuality, hiring a few people rounds down to 0 in the context of an airliner or an office building in Manhattan, and you get a lot of political sway for employing folks and paying payroll taxes, and the "doorman fallacy" is very real. The "robots taking our jobs" narrative seems hugely exaggerated to me.
Yes, I agree, I don't see cargo plane pilots being replaced here. Or indeed commercial pilots in general.
Pilots are an unusual species because most of their utility and training is in the ability to deal with (very) edge cases. Indeed it is their ability to deal with unanticipated edge cases which is their most valuable attribute.
Sure, most pilots won't need those skills during their careers, but the value when they do us immeasurable. Landing on the Hudson anyone?
Equally it is the situational awareness and anticipation of problems which avoid things that could have escalated into disaster but instead become near misses.
Sure 99.99% of their work is routine and could be done hy a machine. But that last 0.01% is thousands of lives, and billions in equipment and cargo.
You don't see the economic pressure for doing that, but single pilot operations is a target for Airbus, so "one pilot instead of two" is already compelling.
To first order, the bigger a vehicle is the less you worry about the cost of the pilot/driver. The biggest untold story in aviation is the battle between the pilots of small "regional aircraft" vs "mainline aircraft", the former of which generate less value for the same amount of work and necessarily get paid less. Unions have enforced "scope clauses" that have prevented a new generation of slightly larger regional aircraft which could lower costs at small airports and have no trouble getting filled as those lower costs get passed on to consumers. As it is small airports are dying out, harming smaller cities and towns and giving the "left behind" all the more reason to lash out.
Similarly there is a lot of a talk of crisis in truck driving, both at the local and long-haul levels. My brother-in-law has a CDL and he is always talking about how inexperienced drivers seem to wedge their trucks on a bridge in Binghamton once a month, stall out on the highway and get into accidents, etc.