I imagine the slow link is that you have to actually test stuff in the real world, on people. Who in this case could very easily die if it doesn’t work. Isn’t like programming where you can just keep whacking it until it works.
The question I have is why they they die if it doesn't work. Imagine how much faster we could progress if people didn't when an experiment failed. But how could we even accomplish such a thing? Telemetrics to catch issues early, and redundancy to hold the patient over until the issue can be found and corrected?
In this case, two separate mechanical hearts built on different principles hoping they would have different failure modes? Would it even be possible to hook that up correctly? Just brainstorming.
Its even worse than you think, there are complex and numerous requirement hoops you need to jump through for medical software and hardware. It is not easy.
I think ASI being able to care, in any sense, is something that is far off. Same for ASI itself, any optimism that it's invention is somehow inevitable in our lifetime is severely misplaced.