You’re probably right, but I’d also bet some things that we’re about to sweep aside will turn out to have been necessities and we’ll find it very difficult to bring them back.
You fail at being pedantic. If you wanted to be pedantic about this, it would first be necessary to define what it is a necessity for. Are the things being swept aside a necessity for the universe to continue existing? No, definitely not. But perhaps they could be a necessity for the (academic) culture to prosper. Which do you think is more likely that the person you responded to meant, that they were talking about things being necessary for the universe to keep existing or things being necessary for our culture to flourish?
There is nothing worse than a half-assed pedant who can't even be sufficiently pedantic to make a point correctly. Really, that's closer to autism, not pedantry. There are inferred clauses when people speak, but you (choose to?) intentionally disregard them and interpret them in the wrong way, thereby arguing against things that weren't said. Even programs can infer unstated clauses by context (eg. can successfully infer from `var x = 2` that x is an int despite it not being said, without explicitly declaring `int x = 2`).
I wonder what it is about this subject that makes people so angry? I think I’ll settle on status. People are afraid of having their social status taken away by AI and become irate at the thought of it.
Going back to my programming example, suppose your compiler decided to interpret 'var x = 2' as a string and then told you you were wrong, throwing an error instead of compiling your program, even though it's the compiler being defective and not adhering to the established language rules for type inference. That's you, in this conversation. That does not add to the conversation. The compiler needs to be fixed so it stops doing that.
Whether you meant it to or not, your post sounded snide and arrogant.
Air is a necessity. If you don't have it, you'll die within a few minutes.
Water is a necessity. If you don't have it, you'll die within a day or two.
Food is a necessity, too, but if you don't have it, you'll live much longer than you would without water!
Vitamin C is a necessity. If you don't have it, but you have other food, you'll live much longer than you would with no food!
So, yeah, you fail at being pedantic in any remotely useful fashion. All you're doing is a quick, dirty, "um, actually" type gotcha, and you're not even correct about it.