"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.
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.