I don't see anything in SOMA that's implausable, so I don't see how it fails to tell us anything about the real world, any more than any other prediction about the future. And we pretty much have to make predictions, its both in our nature and a smart thing to do.

Its possible AI and computing may never be able to reach that level of capability, but we can't know that. One thing that's great about SOMA is that the AI isn't nessessarily very capable and that's part of the problem, its very powerful but its not doing a good job with its enormous task.

But it does give us an idea to chew over. And we can determine how “real world” that idea is. Some of us can even see how to bend the idea a little and make a reasonable version of it “real”.