The ability for a 'pilot' to specify they want surveillance of some area and a drone fly's around pointing a camera at that area is a little more complex than simple autopilot. Classic reconnaissance aircraft often had multiple people to handle all of the complexity's involved, moving to having less than one person per plane and doing the same job takes a lot of automation. That said, something like the MQ-1 Predator actually uses multiple people on the ground due to this issue as does the MQ-9 Reaper which can do autonomous flight operations. But, both systems use multiple aircraft at the same time and have less than one controller per aircraft.

http://www.af.mil/information/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=64...