It’s hardly a herculean task to replace most atc functions with software, detecting planes which are on collision course and instructing them how to avoid that being one of the easiest tasks.
Of course you’d still sometimes need a human in the loop, but you could get by with much less staff
I’m a pilot though, so fairly familiar with how ATC works.
In many places most day-to-day atc operations are already automated and the work is largely data-entry/answering service on the radio. We’re starting to get to the point where speech recognition is better than humans, so it would be perfectly fine to have humans communicate routine atc stuff with a robot.
Of course we’ll need humans available to react to emergencies.
