It has something to say if you compare it to the traditional arguments against the possibility of AI like Searle's terrible "Chinese Room" analogy - the point is arguing that computers can't possibly think because they are "just machines following programming" is a lot like these mechanical aliens believing that the idea of thinking meat is absurd.
I think you completely missed the point about the Chinese Room. The assertion wasn't that machines can't think or compute, but that they don't necessarily have any experience of the thing they are computing. We still have not the faintest idea where consciousness comes from and the Chinese Room thought experiment I think demonstrates this.
The problem is all this talk of "onsciousness" is vague. It's like "free will" -- it's just words, not a real objective thing that can possibly be studied objectively. It's just that people are vain. We wanted to believe we lived at the center of the universe (or at least our collection of planets) and Copernicus taught us otherwise. Then we believed we were of a different sort of being than the animals until Darwin taught us otherwise. True machine intelligence (although we aren't there yet) frightens us in a very similar sense.
The original formulation of Chinese Room deals with ‘understanding’. One supposes that understanding implies some form of subjective experience. I take OP’s use of ‘think’ to refer to an equivalent concept
