Safe, cheaper and boring may be an artifact of the physics of flight in Earth's atmosphere, combined with an intertwined US defense and aerospace industry. Why should we let corporate and government interests "unring" the general computing bell? Why should we let corporate and government interests stuff the genie of democratic publishing back in the lamp?
General purpose computing hardware got super cheap by way of the mass market, and mass production. General purpose programming got cheap and universally available by way of mass communication. In 1983 a C compiler on VMS cost some thousands of dollars. Today, GCC and Clang and Pcc are free, and they do optimizations that Tartan Labs could only dream about.
That's a hugely different path than the carefully-cultivated air travel industry took. I think you're underestimating the effects of the FAA and the DoD on how air travel looks today.
Have you looked at passengers on airplanes lately? I admit it's been a few years for me, but last I saw, airline passengers were, by and large, miserable. They can't wait to get off the airplane. They may prefer current air travel to not seeing their family or getting paid an order of magnitude less, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't be happier with it if it were better. And it could be a lot better.
Does that make airplane nerds like me who think the DC-3 is a good approximation of The Perfect Airplane (rugged, reliable, beautiful) sad? Sure it does. But all those passengers aren't sad. A DC-3 trip from New York to California was a bumpy, sixteen-hour flight with multiple stops for refueling. The same trip on a 757 is a smooth ride above the weather that only takes a few hours and has no stops. And it's cheaper too -- that 1930s trip would have cost more than $4,000 in today's dollars. The 757 ride costs around $550.
This is what happens when industries mature: they become safer, cheaper, and boring.