If startups were making progress this slow on things like self-driving cars, we'd be very underwhelmed. At this rate, we'll all be dead before the majority of cancer treatments are successful.
Technology starts off slow and then, as the base of knowledge upon which one can build expands, it snowballs into daily breakthroughs and progress before plateauing and repeating.
In other words: different industries. Apples and oranges. Do you really think only programmers have creativity and innovation?
Yup, my background is in biophysics but I do software engineering because it's relatively easy. billion-line codebases aren't really complicated to a single cell.
I mean, we've had a small percentage of the planet's human population * 65 years or so to engineer code complexity?
Even given intelligent (depending on the code's author) design vs random evolutionary pressure... every living thing on the planet * billions (/Sagan voice) of years is a long time to compete with.
