With the exception of gods, nothing else in that list besides AI implies any kind of specific action to be taken in the real world that affects people much beyo

With the exception of gods, nothing else in that list besides AI implies any kind of specific action to be taken in the real world that affects people much beyond the ones holding the belief. People who believe in conscious/sentient AI—and, more specifically, believe that some of our current AIs have these properties—consequently believe they have reason to call for changes to how we as a society treat AIs. Those changes are likely to vary—some may call for restricting or banning them entirely, while others call for giving them rights, depending on just what stories about AI they've bought into—but whatever their overall direction, if taken seriously, they would be likely to severely hamper our ability to continue to progress technologically using machine learning.