As the saying goes “so what if we made the world better for nothing”.

So what if there’s a replaceable genius. We still have people who are dying and slaving away not being able to contribute in a more meaningful way.

Is there a more noble goal than reducing human suffering and enabling people to maximize their potential?

But not everyone can have every thought at the right time, and our thoughts compound on each other. Even if 9 women cant have a baby in one month, 8 billion minds working in parallel is still, to me, indisputably better than 1. The future is waiting for us to stop holding our collective selves back.

For sure, I suppose it mainly depends on how common an idea is. If it's something that one in a million people will figure out then there are 8000 redundant people alive for it to be discovered right now and it likely won't make a difference if our population was halved (or didn't have access to the prerequisite information to make the discovery). But there are likely to be ideas that are far rarer than that, and the more people there are the faster those can be discovered I suppose.

Coming up with ideas is only a small part of progress, we also need many more people who will use the results of these ideas, converting them to widespread technologies, instead of leaving them as weird useless curiosities the way it have happened with most of discoveries in ancient world.

If our population was halved, the cost of developing new cpu, new software or a new technology would stay the same, but the benefit would be halved, and therefore less of these things would be developed.

Yes. I am living in a small country (Czechia). Tech products that cannot be internationalized easily, such as software tailored to uses of local legal system, are very visibly underinvested/underdeveloped. A country of ten million just isn't a very attractive market for such niche products.

On the other hand, Czech antivirus business exploded with the advent of the Internet. Everyone and their dog needed some kind of protection against malware.

How do you sort the output?