That's a fascinating idea! The original trauma could just be when humanity reached the ecological limits of the Earth and the fundamental nature of life changed from Eden-like simplicity to competition with others for limited food/space.
(As an aside, you use "flywheel" as a metaphor for positive feedback loops, please don't do that. Flywheels are batteries not feedback loops. It's a pet peeve of mine, sorry.)
It gets a little ranty at the end, which I enjoyed, but you might want to separate out the paper from the rant?
In any event the population leveling out is a very good thing, as so many of our other problems stem directly from population pressure. However, don't forget the Amish! They are among the best farmers on the planet, they have huge families, and they don't fight nor do they use computers or high technology. I say it as a joke but there's some truth to it: the Amish are the meek who inherit the Earth.
In re: AI, the question of "what is good?" is open-ended, the AI force us to confront this question but AI (no matter how intelligent) cannot answer it for us. (cf. Wendel Berry's essay "What are People For?") In other words, Douglas Adams was right: the Earth and humanity are a computer calculating the answer the ultimate question of life, the Universe, and everything: "What is good? What are we for? Where shall we have lunch?"
In the meantime, I follow Bucky Fuller's ideas of the World Game and Design Science Revolution: apply our technology and resources to meet human needs efficiently without "disadvantaging anyone" and nobody has to get nailed to anything.
Politics is group therapy. Since there's enough to go around we don't have to fight each other anymore, we just have to flip back to the community and sharing mode from the competition and hoarding mode, which should be easy as the former is much more fun and fulfilling than the latter, eh? Graeber and Wengrow in "The Dawn of Everything" quote at length a letter from Ben Franklin:
> When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them there is no persuading him ever to return, and that this is not natural merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoner young by the Indians, and lived awhile among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them. One instance I remember to have heard, where the person was to be brought home to possess a good Estate; but finding some care necessary to keep it together, he relinquished it to a younger brother, reserving to himself nothing but a gun and match-Coat, with which he took his way again to the Wilderness.
This was a Wilderness that had hosted large cities and civilizations that were swept away by diseases brought by the Spanish a few centuries earlier. ("1491" https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/30... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_A... ) After the destruction of N. Am civilizations by plague things might have perhaps been a little bit like the old times before the Quaternary Megafauna Extinction, at least for a couple of centuries before the next wave of Europeans arrived.
Anyway, politics is group therapy: we can help people heal from the mal-adaptive mode to normal kindly mode with any of a number of therapies, provided of course that their other needs are satisfied (meaning the lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy. There has to be a context of safety and abundance to for community and sharing to be rational, eh?)