[bubuga]

> Reasonable points, but just because technologies have failed in the past is not predictive of what will come in the future.

True.

But if the only track record is a string of failures, it would be madness to expect this time to be different, particularly as the main problems that plagued other technologies still persist and are being repeated while being brushed aside.

> particularly when exponential change is involved

Even minor changes have disastrous results. Case in point: BART. It's a conventional railway service in the same fashion that's being done for decades all over the world, and somehow the "exponential change" that has been attempted in that project was more than enough to render it a failure.

The main reason why people keep investing in tried-and-true technologies is because the risk of trying it again and succeeding is far lower than reinventing the wheel, even if it's a fancy, popular wheel that is promised to go very fast.