Sometimes I have similar thoughts, and it makes me realize... there are a lot of humans.
Imagine we evolved on a planet with only enough land for 10,000 people. We would never have most of this stuff because people's work would not be specialized enough to get us there. One person would be responsible for so many different things that they wouldn't go into depth on each one. For example, maybe we'd have a library, but one person would be responsible for both printing the books and running the circulation desk. We would have technology (someone would have invented, say, a wood stove), but we wouldn't have anywhere near as much of it.
But instead, we have billions of people now, and it was at least 2000 years ago that we reached 100 million. When you have that many people, although most of them are still working on the basics (growing food, building housing, etc.), in absolute terms there can be millions of people working on specialized tasks.
It also makes me realize how prosperous we are as a species. Although we haven't eliminated poverty and hunger (and should and probably could), as a species, we are far from being on the edge of survival. We have enough resources that we have people working on niche stuff that will pay off in the future if ever. We have projects that require hundreds or thousands of person-years (in other words, equivalent to multiple lifetimes) of work, and the end result of the project is (say) yet another action movie or romcom.
Humans are smart and creative, but the reason we have what we do is lots and lots of people over a very long period of time with way more resources than what we need for subsistence. Which is pretty cool because any of those things could have not happened, but they all did.
One argument I found interesting is that the apparent "massive acceleration" in technological progress can largely be explained by the fact that most "productive human years" have actually been lived quite recently. I think the latest estimate is that "109 billion people have lived and died over the course of 192,000 years" and half of them were in the last 2000 years. It's probably even more extreme if you only count adults (due to improvements in infant mortality).
That simple fact dominates more complex explanations like increased specialization, long-distance communication, organized education, and preservation of knowledge.
I think your point is true, but the implied causation is the other way initially - it's when we started getting rich (= increased productivity), that we could start to support increasingly large populations...which then in turn did lead to more humans producing more knowledge
Interesting summary on the topic of "what changed to allow progress to happen?", from the intro to the book "Bourgeois Dignity" by Dierdre McCloskey: https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/556659.html
It's really important to recognize the incredible resource we have. All of the inventions, all of the music, all of the stories, all of the buildings. All made by humans.
Humanity is how we are going to cure cancer, deploy green energy, travel the stars, and answer the big questions. I really hope the current projections showing human populations will peak in the next century are wrong. I think we should aim for as many humans as can feasibly thrive.
We can probably offset the decline by starting to value human life and time humans can spend creatively. By not gatekeeping humans from education and not exploiting the young in the most braindead service jobs.
To what degree does your definition of feasible include the life we share the planet with? Is a worm or a lemur any less amazing than us humans?
I think we have far passed the tipping point, and what we need is a drastic reduction.
We're not that different from fruit flies. They multiply like crazy as long as there's enough food, and when it's gone, there's a mass die-off.
We're confined to this planet, and it just doesn't have the capacity to support this many of us, be it for resource (agriculture) or just sheer space (balanced ecosystems).
The way I see it, we have two options. We either find a humane way to reduce the global population and allow the planet to find a balance that includes our survival, or we keep going like this and will end up like the fruit flies after that bowl of rotten fruit is gone.
"people's work would not be specialized enough to get us there"
This reminded me of one of the arguments in "Selfish reasons to want more humans" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39497686 : we can get more scientific, technical, and economic progress with a larger population on Earth, as more people can specialize in narrow domains.
Though not if they're impoverished and miserable, so if an extra 8 billion suddenly appeared in random places by magic I tend to think that would be a bad thing.
> But instead, we have billions of people now, and it was at least 2000 years ago that we reached 100 million. When you have that many people, although most of them are still working on the basics (growing food, building housing, etc.), in absolute terms there can be millions of people working on specialized tasks.
Now let's imagine what happens when AI and machines step in and completely take over the menial jobs. The redistribution to cognitive task occupation will deliver another technological revolution.
Unless everyone will just binge on low hanging dopamine fruits.
Along this line of thinking: it also had made us resilient.
If all technology was to stop dead tomorrow, following the chaos of civilization collapse, we’d still have enough humans to do substinence farming and other survival tasks to help us get quickly back on our feet.
I envision a situation closer to the walking dead vs what you described.
Might subsisting on what the land and sea provide also be considered thriving, if done with a close group of people?
I might be in a grass-is-greener mentality, but I think we're kinda broken now; we've hacked the earth computer and aren't taking seriously the job of stewardship. Watching the birds and the recently-emerged Douglas squirrel and the moth that got into the house- I'm envious of their lives. I don't want to give up meta-cognition, but I do want to give up the specialized roles and the reliance on technology and move on (with others) to hunting and gathering on a suitable area.
The earth-computer is marvelous to observe. Being of the Star Wars generation I've grown up with computers and see them as a sideshow now, not to last long because of the complex infrastructure behind it all.
Some influential books I've read:
Wool, by Hugh Howey
The New Wilderness, by Diane Cook
Why We Need to be Wild, by Jessica Carew Kraft
Feral, by George Monbiot
Not to disagree in any way, but as a species, we are also one good asteroid hit or gamma-ray burst away from elimination.