Question: Why has the cure for cancer not been invented yet if robots have! Will robots take over the world before it is invented?

Sreejita Ghosh answered on 3 Jan 2020:

Well there are some cancers which when detected early enough, can be cured. But yes, there is the trouble of the chances of relapse. The relapse can be even seen as a new cancer altogether. My aunt had a malignant tumour in her leg and that was removed years ago. She lived since then with a mobility aid and undergoes regular check up to see if the cancer is back. A month ago she was diagnosed with malignant tumour growth in her uterus. This was probably not due to metastatis since nothing came up during the periodic medical check ups. There are some cancers which are more vicious than others and the medical researchers did come up with ‘cures’ for some types of cancers. But it’s not just cancer that the healthcare researchers have been investigating; they have found vaccines for preventing numerous diseases which could have become epidemic and killed millions of humans; they have made tuberculosis curable ( a disease which was thought to be incurable before 1949).
The important point here is that development in AIs ad robots and development in medical research do not hinder each other. True there has been advancements in AI research, but so has it been in medical research, and yes, even in cancer. With development in AI and machine learning medical researchers are now able to detect complex patterns in RNA sequences and DNA methylation dataset and are consequently able to learn more about cancer, which in turn might help them come up with a cure or a vaccine (there’s vaccine available for some strains of HPV already).
The definition of robot itself is used loosely. Even your vacuum cleaner is a type of robot. The robotic arms used in some surgeries (telemedicine) is also a robot- and these have facilitated treatment. And again the robots we often see in videos from Boston Dynamics are also robots- the funky kinds which scify movies and stories had illustrated for us.
Our world is plagued by different kinds of problems unfortunately. And different researchers are trying to deal with these different problems, because of difference in their research interests, skills, and what they perceive as most crucial. When the paths of a computer scientist, mathematician and a medical research cross they come up with computer aided diagnosis for some set of diseases (something I am doing currently), or a novel treatment monitoring scheme. When a geneticist’s path crosses with that of a mathematician/ computer scientist’s they may try to develop an algorithm which can uncover the secrets of the mutation leading to cancer growth. So the development of robots and AIs and search for cure for cancer are neither related nor completely unrelated.
Please let me know in comment if you have further question, and if I have the answer, I will post it here as an edit. 🙂