system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Star Wars] Why are human pilots needed? Couldn’t the ships fly themselves to destroy shields if needed?

For that matter, why do the ships need droids?  Seems like they would simply get their own brains.
gpt
They could, but the competence and creativity of a human pilot far outweighs anything but the most expensive of quasi-sapient AI. Something even the Empire didn't have the resources to build, power, and maintain en masse. 

As for why R2 units? By acting as the fighter's computer, they can perform necessary calculations that humans just can't do on the fly, and, and because they're removable and mobile, they can accompany their pilot to perform other activities that would also take a human much longer to do. 

The result is a hyper-effective tag team that covers for each other's weaknesses under a huge variety of conditions. Weaknesses that couldn't be eliminated from one or the other without *prohibitively* expensive experimentation.