I disagree, maybe need might decline, but there is a place for both and varied purposes for both. There is always going to be a need for photography. Be it for capturing memories or selling baked beans. You might as well say, there is no need for music or books.

I have never seen this written down for photography but there is a journey.

Stage one is learning the mechanics, what the camera can do how light works the kinds of light that can be applied.
Stage two the vision where you take the knowledge gained from stage one and apply it to get the result you want. You know where you want to get to and how to get it.
Stage three is deciding on what we want to say.
we are authors really and that is kind of hard, it's probably easier to be told what story to tell. It helps to have clients :)
The really difficult thing is to make your own narrative that people are interested in following.

Does that make sense ?

Yes! It is nice to see such a simple yet accurate summary of photographic progression.

One thing you did not specifically mention when speaking to the idea we won't need photography any more - the need to fulfill a creative drive. Many just want snapshots, but there are also many who are using their camera as an instrument or tool for expressing their vision and doing it in a unique way, as art. With the mention of music and books, I understand you meant something along those lines. But in that imagined future where people will no longer need to know how to drive or take pictures, it is also possible that computers will relieve them of the need to cook, and so many other things that take learning to do. However, the need for creative minds will still be there, because computers put out whatever is put in... [Luckily artificial intelligence has not yet [!] been able to truly think for itself...]

Digital is real . It has elevated photography to a new art form in many ways . The speed of looking at what you just shot is phenomenal .
But let's all be honest about something . For new photographers only knowing digital , to acheive what they can do with digital , if handed a film SLR , they would need to shoot no less than 4 or 5 rolls of 36 exposure film .
I used to average a good 10-15 % good shots out of a roll of 36 , and that took years to acheive .
Technology marches on , but in the end you need only a good eye to elevate this hobby to an art form . Without that you can hold in your hand a digital medium format LEICA body and lens for $30,000.00 and it would be meaningless . A trained eye is the ultimate " technological tool " .

In the darkroom, you can reduce, crop, dodge, burn, adjust exposure contrast and colors and... These terms are not "computerized language," they are photographic language. Conceptually, I don't see a lot of difference between a negative and a RAW image, nor between darkroom processing and software processing. In either case, the photographer composes a shot, captures it, and then processes it to get a desired effect.

What separates great photography from the rest is the skill of the photographer: his or her vision and, of course, experience, be it composition or processing. Don't get me wrong, I'm far from a great photographer, but I can appreciate Henry Cartier-Bresson, Matthew Brady, Man Ray (take a look at some of his photos if you want to see some interesting pre-Photoshop compositions), Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange (who caught Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out) - she said "A camera is a device that teaches people to see without a camera," which personally resonates.

When cameras appeared, painters probably looked at photographers as cheating. I suspect that some in the different schools - classicists, romanticists, impressionists, cubists, surrealists, modernists, etc. questioned the capabilities of the others.

Some of the great classical painters manipulated subjects in their work for purely commercial reasons, driven by the fact that their sponsors had very specific views of what they would pay for (a lot of what is recognized as great portraiture is very flattering to the paying subject...). And the truly great artists were almost completely unconstrained by the actual subject: take a look at Picasso's Guernica, then compare it with photos of the bombed town.

Technology advances, and art along with it. Doesn't mean the old is bad - there are still painters. Nor does it mean the new is bad either.

Just different.