In that case, could you please expound upon why increasing the human population by X% increases our technological advancement by X%? I must’ve missed where you supported that assertion with facts or evidence.
> There seems likely to be a minimum population that can support the degree of specialization needed for a given level of technological advancement.
50 people can support much smaller degree of specialization than 50 million people can. This should be fairly obvious, so I am not sure why it needs to be restated.
Granted, having X number of living humans could conceivably be necessary to facilitate the specialization required to bootstrap technological advancement. But even a highly generous take on this would reveal it’s “necessary but not sufficient”. Fundamentally, X number of humans does not equal X level of technology. If an X% increase in population really did in fact lead to an X% increase in technological advancement, then we could e.g. achieve AGI merely by multiplying the number of living humans by some constant.
