Couldn't you say that about 99% of humans too?
And of course, if you don't limit yourself to "advancing the state of the art at the far frontiers of human knowledge" but allow for ordinary people to make everyday contributions in their daily lives, you get even more. Sure, much of this knowledge may not be widespread (it may be locked up within private institutions) but its impact can still be felt throughout the economy.
Even this assumes that everyone has a specialization in which 1% of people contribute to the sum of human knowledge. I would probably challenge that. There are a lot of people in the world who do not do knowledge-oriented work at all.
Your math assumes each person has exactly one thing they do in life. The shoe factory worker could also be a gardener. He might not make any advancements in gardening, but his contribution means that if you add up all the fields of specialization the sum is greater than the population of humans. Take 1% of that sum and it’s greater than 1% of humans. 1% of people in a specialization is not the same as 1% of specialists. In fact, I would say it’s a much higher proportion of specialists making contributions (especially through collaboration).
Oh, and don’t get caught up on the 1% number. I used it as shorthand for whatever small number it is. Maybe it’s only 10 people in some hyper-specialized field. But that doesn’t matter. Some other field may have thousands of contributors. You don’t have to be a specialist in a field to make a contribution to that field, for example: glassmakers advanced the science of astronomy by making the telescope possible.
How? By also "synthesizing the data they were trained on" (their experience, education, memories, etc.).
