Disagree. As Grant Permission pointed out, we live on a planet with an insanely complex ecosystem.

“Going to the moon” is multiple orders of magnitude easier than “living on the moon” in the same way that “going to the beach” is a couple orders of magnitude easier than “moving to Hawaii.”

I’ve been programming and designing systems since my days in university in the mid-80s. One of my university projects was designing and writing AI code (in its infancy then!) to have a computer design electronic filters based on user needs. For the last 30 years I design and implement multivariable real-time optimization feeding multivariable real-time process control. To get repeatable results that never “drive you into a ditch” it is necessary to collect and process huge amounts of data. The actual control is quite straightforward and repeatable…once you finally get there. Along the way we have thousands of decisions to make.

Our system runs once a minute or two minutes. An AI driven car will have at least an order of magnitude more inputs, and must respond in microseconds.

The HUGE difference between a system such as we use and an AI driven car compared to life on another planet is that in the first two cases, there is always an option to turn it off. The systems needed on Mars can never be turned off, they must account for everything, including the unkown, and allow users to access and tweak in real-time, so (for example) the oxygen pump that is not working automatically can be turned on so that everyone doesn’t die.

Astronauts/Cosmonauts can only be on the space station weeks or months, because weightlessness totally fucks up the human body that is designed to be mostly upright on planet earth. We have no idea yet how the reduced gravity of Mars, change of light spectrum, artificial atmosphere, etc. will affect the human body over months and years on Mars. Since it takes months (years?) to get there, that must also be factored into the risks and plans.

Finally, AI driven cars can barely function autonomously on well-lighted, well-marked streets in areas like Arizona with virtually no precipitation. We are a looong ways from even 99% automous driving.