The future of english

Which argument do you think is the writer's strongest argument in his favour ?

Nicholas Ostler tries to argue in this article that the days of English as the world's lingua-franca are numbered.
One of his main argument is that with the huge advances in computer translation and speech recoginition, it will not be necessary to learn English as a second language because every computers will do the work.

Would you agree with the writer's point of view ?

I agree with the writer when he says that English is going to be less spoken in the world but I thnik he should use another argument.
World is more and more complex and I think that others languages are going in the future to replace English because of the economic development in certains countries.
In the near future we can imagine that US and Europe economies are going to decline and that China, India or Brazil are going to be the 1st world power.
Nowadays, English is lingua-franca as French and Spanich were in the past.  We can easily think that English will be replace by another language, though.