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Let me suggest a contrarian view which might or might not play out:

Contrary to what most economists and analysts tell us, a large population, or even a growing population, might be more harmful than beneficial in the new age of AI and robots.

If we want to talk about national wealth, much depends on how we define it but if we define it as the mass of goods divided by the number of supplicants for those goods we begin to ask, if our GNP is produced by artificial intelligence and robots, do we need more than 330 million people to increase production? If we are dividing the sum of production by the population, would not a more manageable population make us richer rather than poorer?

If we are entering a technological age in which wealth at the level of conception is done by a very few brilliant human minds while the bulk of production is done by smart machines, how do we distribute the wealth? If we don't distribute the wealth, do we risk revolution? If we do distribute the wealth will we certainly kill off incentive?

It seems to me these questions become all the more intractable the more disparity between the elite and the consuming class is increased by virtue of size of population.

Most of the arguments in favor of large population, or more intelligently of growing population, center on the need to create markets for consumption. In an age in which 3D printing is making us rethink the entire concept of economies of scale, should we not also rethink this maxim?

You touched on another argument in support of an ever-growing population: Social Security.

I do not understand an argument that essentially says that the way to shore up a Ponzi scheme is to expand the Ponzi scheme to an ever greater number of participants. I do not accept the view that we need to engage in an immigration/population Ponzi scheme in order to maintain a growing economy. That is what we say about Social Security. In effect we divide the cost of maintaining our seniors by an ever shrinking workforce and despair at the arithmetic so we simply kick the can down the road and make it ultimately worse.

Instead, we should analyze these problems in terms of productivity of our machinery rather than productivity of our workers. Inevitably, we are going to have to substitute robots for people as we have already done in the world of information technology. The downside of the present system is to encourage sending our jobs to India and China. I think we have somehow got to think in terms of production overall instead of production per man-hour. We already have the tools, such as return on capital etc. but we are not employing them in the policymaking arena.

I'll respond to each point you bring up if you don't mind.

The biggest problem we would face if we started trying to think of ways to mitigate the transition between an economy based largely on the proposition that we have a constantly growing population is that in the modern age, we have no real precedent for it. As you say, it would take us looking closely at our concepts of production, GNP, and how this interacts with the population. I think it would behoove us greatly if we could actually take the time to look at how we manage taxation. Presently, the government generates a substantial percentage of it's revenue based on income taxes. In a world where more and more labor is actually being performed by robots, and 'AI', (a rather nebulous concept at present, as even the best AI systems these days are more idiot savants than anything else), do we somehow tax the productivity of these machines. I admit that I don't really see any way to do that, mainly because we all know that the government almost always takes things to a ridiculous extreme.

If you continue to tax incomes as is done today, to actually speed up the move towards automation, since you do not have to pay taxes on the work of automatons. Even with a reduced population, people are still going to need to work, and not all folk are suited to the work of IT, programming, and the like. Service industries will still have a place, though even there, you can easily see the ever increasing amount of such work being taken over by machines of one sort or another. Even places like restaurants are increasingly seeing things like kiosks or tablets at the table to manage the taking of orders and payment.

If we are entering a technological age in which wealth at the level of conception is done by a very few brilliant human minds while the bulk of production is done by smart machines, how do we distribute the wealth? If we don't distribute the wealth, do we risk revolution? If we do distribute the wealth will we certainly kill off incentive?

The incentive problem is where the real rub is. It is likely that some, if not many folk will want to work, and will do what it takes to keep themselves employable, while many are all too likely to fall into a pattern of indolence. I read a lot of science fiction, and these days you often see references to a 'BLS', or Basic Living Stipend. Few authors take the time to think through the logical consequences of such a system. If you're looking at a BLS system that acts as a 'floor', you still need to be able to somehow come up with a way to pay for such a system. Do they continue to tax income? Do they move to a VAT-type of tax? Do they simply charge fees for services rendered? I have noticed that those governments that have a VAT, still also have high levels of personal income taxes, and higher corporate taxes than the U.S.

Lacking anything else, I suspect we are going to be stuck in a world for the foreseeable future where what you get out is dictated by what you put in. i.e., if a company's management believes you are providing $x value per hour, you will be paid $x-y%. I'm not sure what to do about people with no marketable skill.

Perhaps the solution is, as you say, to start thinking in terms of population reductions rather than growth. Even with that though, I'm not sure how you could maintain or even stabilize the economy given that by definition, half of the population has an IQ of less than 100. I certainly don't think I'd trust any government to handle this in any but the most brutal and destructive manner, as it seems that history tells us that governments are much better at tearing things down than they are at building them up.

I believe the entire notion of social security is one of the most destructive things to come out of the 20th century. We knew going in that ponzi schemes like this are unsustainable, yet we bought into it. You are right that it was the fuzzy thinking of us having an ever growing workforce to sustain it that probably overcame the logical hurdles. That, and the fact that people are lazy and always want something for nothing. Once we realized what our prosperity and advancing technology was doing to actuarial tables, we should have immediately started the process of scrapping it, and used things like personal 401ks instead. By the time I was 18, if not considerably before, I have simply ignored the existence of SS, because I've never thought it would apply to me. Even though I'm now much closer to the end of my life than the beginning of it, I fully expect for means testing, or some other method to cut me out of it because I have been somewhat diligent in taking care of future myself.

I think we have somehow got to think in terms of production overall instead of production per man-hour. We already have the tools, such as return on capital etc. but we are not employing them in the policymaking arena.

I'm not sure how we can get there, because there is going to be a large part of our population that simply cannot be productive enough to make a difference in the face of 21st century technology.