The philosophy in aerospace is more to build a better engine rather than to have more engines, and this extends to every aspect of aircraft design. Engines are already built to contain catastrophic failure, and the planes themselves remain functional for all but the most extreme situations. We're at the point where essentially every lost aircraft is a compound failure, with significant human factors contributing to the event. It's likely that we're on the pareto front of what engineering can reasonably accomplish, and the only gains in safety either barely nudge the needle of what we would notice (better materials, say), or difficult for the market to accept (removing pilots altogether).
Aerospace RND has been looking into hybrid propulsion systems for a long time. If there's one thing they aren't shy about pushing, it's the ability to go higher, faster, more efficiently. Such systems aren't used because they aren't yet good enough.
There's no reason think that removing pilots altogether would enhance safety. Military experience has shown that mishap rates for unmanned aircraft are significantly higher than similar crewed aircraft. Routine flight operations can be automated pretty well now but where human pilots really earn their pay is with handling emergencies and other unexpected situations. The variety of potential emergencies is effectively infinite so it's simply impossible to write and test code to handle them in advance. Instead pilots have to improvise in real time based on intuition and first principles logic. Current AI technology still isn't capable of that.