"Watson" is a marketing term for a bunch of slap-dash and half-assed analytics products that don't work.

It was never more than a cool Jeopardy robot and some sweet Bob Dylan ads

The example in the article given was that Watson recommended giving a blood thinning agent to someone with "severe bleeding", so I think, at least in this example, that there's a long way to go until Watson is ready for diagnosing without a doctor's consent and review.

Not to mention that even if the AI technology here was decent (which it doesn't appear to be) it suffered greatly from a dearth of samples. Machine learning requires big data, and cancer treatment data is, in many instances, just not big enough. An AI solution would need millions of well-labeled, perfectly formatted cases to learn from; there may be thousands of those for a particular subtype of cancer, but there's not millions.

Not if you understand mechanism. In reality the breakthrough will be biologists applying ML/AI, not the other way around. Domain and mechanistic knowledge are king.

>Out of something from science fiction.. would an "issue" like this ever be the type of problem where the AI can "understand" the cancer better

Ever? I don't see why not. In our lifetime? Probably not and especially not with current technology.