I get that, but path-tracing is realism, there's nothing to add or nothing to remove. It's a full optical simulation. Path-tracing is not about what 'effects'

I get that, but path-tracing is realism, there's nothing to add or nothing to remove. It's a full optical simulation. Path-tracing is not about what 'effects' it can do, it's about speed, precision, and accuracy, and nothing else. That answers the technology question the article is talking about. Another question was art and content. For that I will say that new tools will be developed that combine huge libraries of 3D scanned content and procedural generation. Artists are still needed for 'art direction', which is the part where he decides what general shapes and materials he wants, and basically traditionally models almost everything like houses etc. That is still a huge amount of work for games like Skyrim, but the end result will always be photorealistic, and it should not be the artist's job to care about how it looks anymore.