Such an article is funny from one of the last country in the world not to have adopted automated loaders inside their heavy tanks but continue to rely on a human loader meaning a crew of four under armor instead of three. One has also to remember that soviet tanks have been lighter (40t), more agile, with smaller turrets and autoloaders since the sixties ...

the idea of scaling down and going more mobile is precisely the reason the tank was able to supplant horse drawn artillery around a maze of trenches and forts.
the tank was a mobile mini fort. it still is. tanks actually do a large part of their tactical job when they are not moving and just sitting, parked, waiting for orders.
to 'replace' the tank, one must first conceptualize the forces tactics and strategies that define the group of distinct modern battlefields, --urban, suburban, mountainous, rural, coastal, -----those areas with anti-aircraft weaponry and those without, etc...
it is not likely that a single or even group of weapons will replace the 'tank' so much as the operations and combinations of weapons and behavior replacing a large portion of the situations in which tanks operate .
obviously---once you 'unmann' a vehicle , it doesn't need as much armor and weight for life support systems and fire supression.
unmanned high speed mine sweeping convoy leading vehicles----'trailblazers' are still manned tanks!. there are plenty of low hanging fruit in the world of military technological replacements.
finding ways of replacing the 'tank' are superfluous. all the military technologists need to do for the time being is find manned specialties that can be replaced with drone or autonomous ground vehicles until fewere and fewer human beings are necessary for operations. ultimately the same outcome will result-----which is the planned obselence of tanks for once necessary tasks.
as tanks are required for fewere and fewere tasks, they can eventually be phased out or directly replaced by the final link in the puzzle.

@ Deres The human loader is faster and less likely to have a problem that keeps the gun from firing. Quickness is a function of power to weight ratio. Also tanks take a phenomenal amount of maintenance.

@ Deres
I don't know if their current versions are any better, but the Russian auto-loader designs of the cold war era were rubbish.
They were frequently disabled by the crew due to faults, had a tendency to "eat" the gunners arm if they weren't careful and got in the way, and were much slower than a well trained American tank crew.
From the T 90 entry in Wikipedia: "Like other modern Russian tanks the 2A46M in the T-90 is fed by an automatic loader which removes the need for a manual loader in the tank and reduces the crew to 3 (commander, gunner, and driver). The autoloader can carry 22 ready-to-fire rounds in its carousel and can load a round in 5–8 seconds."
Thanks to the carousel with exposed charges, if enemy fire penetrated the hull, the whole lot would go up together.
A good US crew could fire 3 rounds in ten seconds and be starting on round 4, while the Russian tank with auto-loader would just be coming ready to fire shot number 2.
It's also been suggested that 4 is a good number to have for a tank crew, as it provides enough personnel for heavy maintenance, guard duty etc when in camp.
And didn't the Russian tanks perform well against the Americans in the Iraq wars!

From many points of view, zevulon has it about right in my admittedly inexpert opinion. However, I think that there is one flaw in his/her analysis, and I have no idea how to get round it.
We need to keep the final phase of any battle/war only achievable by having 'boots on the ground'. This would ensure that infantry lives are put at risk. This is essential if we are going to avoid a whole load of politicians voting for endless war in return for campaign contributions from the industrial military complex, who would reap massive rewards from such a policy. Body bags and the rituals associated with the return of fallen warriors are about the only things that will raise public opinion against such a nightmarish situation. Lose that, and we face the dystopian future so often portrayed in the cinema.
Callous, yes, but realistic too, I hope.

Well, I just hope this all new, lightweight, highly manoeuvrable machine has the ability to land on its wheels every time if, indeed, when it hits an EOD.

@Grunt - that's easy; they just need to make it out of cats.

Israel already has a system for this - the Trophy defense system - couple this with some automonous drones that can self dock for charging and you can add in some additional capability of a grid network around hte vehicle which can even sacrifice themselves etc.

Now, this will be interesting to watch as it unfolds...

Where would the banking oligarchs that lend money for wars and killing machines be if terrorists and the enemy du jour disappeared?