Even if I grant the premise that we should maximize the number of humans, it's not clear that growing the population immediately achieves that, unless you're bi

Even if I grant the premise that we should maximize the number of humans, it's not clear that growing the population immediately achieves that, unless you're biased to favor of humans alive in the year 2025 above humans alive further into the future. A less biased objective is to maximize the expected value of the number of all humans that will ever exist from now onwards. Then you have to start thinking about things like global warming which will cause destabilizations (e.g. large scale climate refugees fleeing the equator in the year 2060 and the rise of authoritarianism in the global north as a reaction) which causes future population decline which is self-sabotaging of the objective of increasing the number of humans. I think the real problem here is really just global warming. If we can fix that, we should be able to add many more billions of people, with all the associated upsides and without the biggest downside.