AI – Billions of $ to copy humans

You mention entirely different things: 1. AI (as the many-sided phenomenon that it is) is coming, want it or not. It'll become a political problem to select the good parts from the bad, so we can have our cake and eat it too, without plunging everything into yet another economical/social disaster.

2. If there's one thing we don't need, it's more people. Limits to sustainable growth/steady-state are already being routinely surpassed and each time a new human is born you make a commitment to allow him/her to live, that is you can't simply adjust population ethically like you can adjust e.g. the amount of money or products in an economy. (One of the few places where poverty is so rampant that human populations are reduced to (practical) carrying capacity of that region by natural means is North Korea (see the North Korean famine))

Further population growth today makes no sense by any reasonable metric unless you want to populate other planets which we can't in the foreseeable future to any significant degree, and I fear some (primarily African) regions are going to learn this the hard way (OTOH these supremely poor regions show you just how resilient the human body can be, so population count becomes a choice between many people just surviving or few people actually living sustainably).