I think this is ultimately true, in a sense, but the challenge is correctly handling all of the edge-cases. It's a challenging problem tantamount to the self-driving car problem.
It happens by humans over VHF because a lot of unpredictable things happen in busy airspace, and it would require a massive investment for machines to automate all of it.
I'm also not sure that people would accept the safety risk of airplanes' autopilots being given automated instructions by ATC over the air. There's a large potential vulnerability and safety risk there. I think there's some potential for automation to replace the role of ATC currently, but I suspect it would still be by transmitting instructions to human pilots, not directly to the autopilot.
Lastly, for such a system to ever be bootstrapped, it would still need to handle all of the planes that didn't have this automation yet; it would still need to support communicating with pilots verbally over VHF. An entirely AI ATC system, that autonomously listens to and responds by voice over VHF seems like a plausible first step though.
It happens by humans over VHF because a lot of unpredictable things happen in busy airspace, and it would require a massive investment for machines to automate all of it.
I'm also not sure that people would accept the safety risk of airplanes' autopilots being given automated instructions by ATC over the air. There's a large potential vulnerability and safety risk there. I think there's some potential for automation to replace the role of ATC currently, but I suspect it would still be by transmitting instructions to human pilots, not directly to the autopilot.
Lastly, for such a system to ever be bootstrapped, it would still need to handle all of the planes that didn't have this automation yet; it would still need to support communicating with pilots verbally over VHF. An entirely AI ATC system, that autonomously listens to and responds by voice over VHF seems like a plausible first step though.