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.
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.
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.
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.
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
That simple fact dominates more complex explanations like increased specialization, long-distance communication, organized education, and preservation of knowledge.