What is the current and future state of SEO as you see it?

I read so many blogs and hear so many podcasts that say "SEO is dead" or soon will be. Do you think there is any truth to these arguments? Or does SEO just get a bad rap because there are so many people who illegitimately claim to know so much about it, but aren't successful? I work for a large agency mainly on PPC stuff but am thinking about learning more about SEO, just don't know much about where it's going.

My insights about SEO, I agree that it's future is becoming cloudy and stormy because many site's owner nowadays uses a blackhat approach for getting higher ranking position in SERP, in short they are cheating just to display a high ranking of their sites without following the legal optimization procedure. I've read one article on the internet that says like this, read the whole story from the link below: