The most influential models of economic growth are all about people. These models predict that with a shrinking population, economic growth and technological progress stop and humanity stagnates into extinction. Metascience proposals focus mostly on improving the design of scientific institutions. This is surely important, but in the face of rapidly declining population growth rates it is like making a dam more efficient when the river is running dry.
Why Are People So Important?
Physical capital is subject to diminishing returns and depreciation which inevitably bring its impact on economic growth to zero. People, on the other hand, have increasing returns. As groups of people get larger, they can cooperate and specialize making the group more productive than the sum of its parts. But most importantly: People can share ideas.
When one person has an idea that makes them productive, it can be near-costlessly copied to all the other people in the economy, multiplying its effect. These increasing returns make people the driving force behind economic models of growth. There are important temporary sources of growth, like increasing education, research intensity, and labor force participation, but these are all changes to the percentage of your population that is devoted to discovering ideas and growing the economy. This percentage can only grow to 100 so the long run rate of growth is always constrained by the population growth rate.