I'm getting off topic and I won't do this very often but: As to the ultimate goal of the FAA, "There's the old aviation joke about airplanes of the future having a dog in every cockpit, the pilot's job being to feed the dog and the dog's job to bite the pilot if he tries to touch anything."
Or, more specifically, quoting an editorial from Flying Magazine, "Autonomous flight ...will remove us from the job of pilot and turn us into systems managers instead, presumably without much ability to take control of things should something go wrong, a scary thought."
When my airplane partner worked for the airlines, designing FMC's for 767's, there was a phrase in the Industry, "Management by Exception." (Which is how a Constitutional government is supposed to work too. But now I'm really off-topic.) That is, all instructions would come up from the Ground (from Big Brother) and the pilot could intervene only if something was obviously amiss.
I used to wonder, like going cashless and taking the mark of the beast, why would anyone go there? For example, we purposely didn't put altitude capability in our autopilot in the Glasair because I don't like being that far out of the loop in flight. (Especially on an ILS.) But, like opting not to carry as much cash around sometimes (as opposed to cash being illegal), I can see how we voluntarily go there initially. Even I am advocating for some level of automation in the cockpit to make flying more ergonomic, so that flying is easier and safer.
The art, I submit, is knowing what is good and bad automation. For me, having iFly simply call out various alerts like a copilot would, is good automation.