Maybe eventually, but what I'm interested in is right now, does the tesla autopilot fail more often than a human driving in similar conditions. My suspicion is that it does.

Indeed, and that may often be because of taking warranted risks. It bothers me that when making comparisons of driving safety people tend to suffer from absence blindness and discount other important things like the death avoidance cases. Let's say you have a bleeding injured person which requires urgent access to a medical facility. Here the driver can take some risks in order to save a life. Or any number of causes that may warrant risk taking. Now, take away the control from that driver and leave it to an autopilot that may compute the driving parameters in order to satisfy minimum pollution, safety (from the manufacturer's judicial liabilities prospective), and whatnot. Heck, I foresee cases when the autopilot won't even approve any movement due to whatever considerations when there may be passengers in risk of loosing their lives if won't reach somewhere soon enough. For now people can take risks, which may be both good and bad. Don't look only at the bad side.

A human, with proper training and heuristics, can reasonably be expected to never make a mistake that causes a terrible accident.

Unfortunately, a large part of "proper training" involves being driven around as a passenger for your entire childhood, immersed in a car culture. Further, the heuristics are commonly ignored by males younger than, say, 25.

Ok I know this is my little cause of the moment, but seriously why are computers apriori better at anything? Sure they don't make poor life choices but they are absolutely at the mercy of the quality of the algorithms, sensors, operating system, training data and physical computational hardware.

If a driver ever has to make that choice, they were going too fast in the first place. You should never be going faster than the stopping distance to the nearest blind spot, unless you're driving on a controlled access highway.

the real shocking truth is none of these systems is capable of driving when even skilled drivers might need the assistance. think about it this way, car safety systems are designed to insure recovery of safe driving during some of the worst conditions yet self driving systems cannot handle most of these poor conditions as they cannot accurately see and assess the situation.

I seem to remember reading a paper postulating drivers unconsciously always try to avoid crashing their side of the car into hard objects.

It would seem as the life expectancy of dwarves will go up.