If the drone flies itself, what skill do I actually have?

Here is your situation, plainly: the drone used to need your hands. Now it flies itself, and you sit watching a screen instead of holding a stick. It feels like your job got smaller. You wonder if you were ever more than an operator. Ask yourself the honest question. When you looked at that footage, where was the value — in the flying, or in what you saw after? You spotted the crack in the pipe, the drift in the field, the thing that didn't match the plan. That noticing, that judging, is not nothing. It is the whole job. The machine only ever did the easy part. Your task now is not to grieve the old skill. It is to prove — to yourself, then to anyone paying you — that the judgment was the real skill all along, and that it's worth more now that the flying is free.