1**.** is debatable: I know artisans had the same sort of complaints when the industrial revolution happened, and this may be our generations’ industrial revolution.

I don't think this is debatable because the artisans were right. Industrialization killed fine work of all kinds from carpentry to weaving to shoemaking to tailoring to typesetting to all kinds of skills in favour of the generic and artless. The only people who can now afford fine skilled work are the people who removed it from the rest of us.

I don't think the comparison with the industrial revolution is apt. The work that was replaced by automation back then was all repetitive, algorithmic work. It's not as though before the fully automated loom was invented, that every new cloth that needed to be weaved was a new intellectual challenge. It required skill that took effort to obtain, but once you had it, it was mostly going through the motions. The problem with it was the fact that it was done in a way that it exclusively enriched and empowered the factory owners at the expense of the workers, not the automation itself.

AI is the opposite: it's too unreliable, too inefficient, and you have too little control over it to be useful for high-volume, repetitive work, so it's mostly used for bespoke work. It does a piss-poor job at that too, but if you lower your standards far enough, you can get away with a lot less thinking and decision-making than you would have to do otherwise. And that's pretty much what these companies are trying to get us to do, lower our standards.

i think we should use AI to end animal testing

Thankfully that will never happen. The modern wave of AI doesn't scale and can't scale.