Yes. If you were to reduce production to people's real material needs -- food, water, shelter, energy, clothing, medicine -- these problems are basically solved in the West. They're not far from solved in Eastern Europe and the Far East is getting close, too.

So where does that leave people? People get gradually corralled into smaller and smaller niches of things that machines don't do better, and it's gradually turning out that we're creating a new aristocracy of bullshit artists.