At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in 1800, there was about 1 Billion people. It took until 1927 for that to double to 2 billion, and go from the cotton gin to automatic weapons. I definitely think we could go from that to the society we have today without a 4x population increase in the last 96 years. We were already making basic computers during WW2. I don’t think the growth of population is the primary driver of the development the semi conductor, or silicon wafers, or transistors, or really any of the technological hallmarks of our current civilization. The institutions and wealth available would facilitate these developments among the highly trained academics, even if the population growth from 1927 to current was cut in half or even more.