Great post. Supposedly in the vast number of cases where astronauts are piloting landers they intentionally disable the autonomous controls, but it's not necessarily just so they can feel like they're in control. They are trained to know what the autonomous controls are good at, what the programming was designed to do, and what conditions it was *not* designed for. The pilot has to respond to current realities, the engineer who designed the code was doing so often years in the past based on what he *thought* conditions would be like. I would argue that despite our technology's seeming sophistication, our dynamic with it has yet to change whatsoever. The Model T was autonomous in that you didn't have to use your legs or a horse in order to move forward. When we automate processes that enables us to do other things at the same time and realize that there is more that we want to do with the technology we have automated. As the "automatic" functions in the automobile grew more expansive and sophisticated the more we realized  we could do with it. Perhaps automating driving with free us to focus on enabling the cars to fly.