It gives us... not much.
It gives less informed audiences information that is actually novel to them, because they do not already master the previous inferential step of "Doing the same amount/quality of stuff on a more powerful computer is easier", seeing as that depends on understanding the very idea that programs can and do get optimized to work on weaker machines or do things faster on current machines.
That's even assuming the audience already has all the inferential steps before that, e.g. "Programming does not involve using an arcane language to instruct electron-monsters to work harder on maths so that you can be sure they won't make mistakes while doing multiplication" and "Assigning x the same value twice in a row just to make sure the computer did it correctly is not how programming is supposed to work".
For this, I'll refer to insanely funny anecdotal evidence. I've seen cases just as bad as this happen personally, so I'm weighing in favor of those cases being true, which together form relevant evidence that people do, in fact, know very little about this and often omit to close the inferential gap. People like hitting the Ignore button, I suppose.
While going through the list of arguments for why to expect human level AI to happen or be impossible I was stuck by the same tremendously weak arguments that kept on coming up again and again. The weakest argument in favour of AI was the perenial:
Lest you think I'm exaggerating how weakly the argument was used, here are some random quotes:
At least Moravec gives a glance towards software, even though it is merely to say that software "keeps pace" with hardware. What is the common scale for hardware and software that he seems to be using? I'd like to put Starcraft II, Excel 2003 and Cygwin on a hardware scale - do these correspond to Penitums, Ataris, and Colossus? I'm not particularly ripping into Moravec, but if you realise that software is important, then you should attempt to model software progress!
But very rarely do any of these predictors try and show why having computers with say, the memory capacity or the FOPS of a human brain, will suddenly cause an AI to emerge.
The weakest argument against AI was the standard:
Some of the more sophisticated go "Gödel, hence no AI!". If the crux of your whole argument is that only humans can do X, then you need to show that only humans can do X - not assert it and spend the rest of your paper talking in great details about other things.