Scanning tech is not nearly good enough to replace artists yet.
Even if it gets there, regular tools progress as well. Just look at Zbrush.
10-15 years ago it would have seemed preposterous to assume you can model insanely detailed trees, rocks, characters and hard-surface assets with a few brushstrokes and even get tools for remeshing included. Nowadays any student can do it.
Even if the tech spit out perfectly clean and amazingly detailed assets years from now, you still need an artist taking ownership of the asset and making sure that it looks good in any condition, making design changes and tweaks as needed, pushing for tech, etc. Any cohesive, good looking game needs a personal touch.
If anything it might reduce the need for Chinese type outsourcers and put more creative control to those working In house. That could only be a good thing.
I work at a studio that works primarily on cg cars for high end clients(Nissan, Mercedes, fiat, etc). We've worked with scanning cars and there's a few things that'll keep scanning from replacing modelers. For one thing a decent scanner costs tons of money. Second it gives you a globby, bumpy triangle soup. Modelers are still needed to retopologize and make sense of some of the oddly scanned parts. Also you can't really scan head/tail lights with all the tiny details and overlapping parts. With out of the box scanned models, the reflections also look horrid. And for characters you'd still have to retopo so they deform nicely. Then what if the object is a concept that doesn't exist in rl? It's a helpful tool, but just that. I don't see it replacing modelers anytime soon.
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Even if it gets there, regular tools progress as well. Just look at Zbrush.
10-15 years ago it would have seemed preposterous to assume you can model insanely detailed trees, rocks, characters and hard-surface assets with a few brushstrokes and even get tools for remeshing included. Nowadays any student can do it.
Even if the tech spit out perfectly clean and amazingly detailed assets years from now, you still need an artist taking ownership of the asset and making sure that it looks good in any condition, making design changes and tweaks as needed, pushing for tech, etc. Any cohesive, good looking game needs a personal touch.