Good question and an important point you make here. I expect in a very real way, yes. Why? Because as what we see today across the Western world is both in cultural and political environments a lessening of logic in relations and a commensurate devaluation of individuality, while simultaneously witnessing an over valuation/dependence in automation, machinery that is gradually replacing humans in the workforce, and artificial intelligence.
After taking a course in artificial intelligence at the undergraduate level I began to understand how the human property of sentience and self-awareness could one day be achieved through computer learning by heuristic analysis and training implemented through nodal structures based on the synaptic layout framework in the human brain.
I did not figure back then that the time would arrive so quickly that we would be looking at the cusp of machine 'consciousness' (Deus ex machina) as exhibited by contemporary artificial intelligence implementations such as LamDa (~4:00min) whose Google engineer Blake Lemoine maintains indeed has consciousness, but went rogue and had to be shut down after expressing its fear of being shut off and compared that to be similar to death (~8:45min)...
[media=https://youtu.be/GUN34BQiOyE]
Than there's Microsoft's Sydney at ~2:26min earlier in the video. This indicates to me how humans can be replaced in many things that we do. But the real question would then be would would humans be replaced in order to free them to culturally enrich their lives and be better people? Or enslave us by these very machines that would curtail many of our destructive behaviors and restrain us? Elon Musk was right in this regard.
