Ok I see the distinction now. Our increased production has mostly come from increasing the rate at which we're depleting existing resources, rather than increasing the "steady state" productivity. Since we're still nowhere near sustainable, we can't really claim that we're below carrying capacity.

But yes, I have a lot of hope for the role of AI in ecological restoration. Reforesting with drones, hunting invasive species with killer robots, etc.

For a long time I've thought that we need a much smaller population, but I do think there's something to the argument that certain techies have made, that more people = more innovation. If you need to be in the 99.99th percentile to invent a particular technology, there will be more people in that percentile if the population is larger. This is why China wins so many Olympic medals - they have an enormous distribution to sample from. So if we wanted to maximize the health of the biosphere at some future date (say 100 years from now), would we be better off with a large population reduction or not? I don't know if it's that obvious. At any rate, ASI will probably make a bigger difference than a 50% change in population size...