A pretty great mix of sharply prescient and horribly wrong.
Maybe a few straw men mixed in too, because I don't think there were many serious claims that computers would replace teachers. Computers and software were seen as supplementary.
There was a lot of excitement among tech enthusiasts in the mid-90s about virtual/cyber everything. I remember hearing regularly that soon we wouldn’t need local mediocre teachers because everyone could be taught virtually in cyberspace by the best teachers on the planet. It’s not hard to find tech demos from the era that are reminiscent of current-day VR/mixed-reality work. But by the time the internet became fast and universal enough, what had survived the dot-com crash had little of that flavor left.
My perspective is of someone in the educational software business at the time. The idea of replacing teachers wasn’t really a thing there.
We saw teachers as the co-primary users of the software. The other users were the kids, of course. So there was a lot of consideration, e.g., to how teachers would use the software, what they needed it to do, etc. Actually, the product leads were typically former teachers.
It wasn’t just us either. It wasn’t a thing at the conferences I went to either. I think it would have come across as a silly/unserious idea.
You could really only entertain it if you had no idea what teachers actually do.
Maybe a few straw men mixed in too, because I don't think there were many serious claims that computers would replace teachers. Computers and software were seen as supplementary.