"today's unskilled workers aren't going to be the robot owners of the future"
Careful with your crystal ball there; you might end up sounding like the people who predicted similar things about computers. Robots will become very cheap in the future; they won't be exclusive to the "bourgeoisie".
"You can't just start making everyone work less"
Who said anything about making? That's far too authoritarian for my liking. People will choose to work less when they can achieve the lifestyle they want with less work. It will take a while for this to become socially acceptable, but I think it will happen.
I am less than 40, and I would be happy indeed if this became a problem during my lifetime, but I'm still skeptical.
The 'price' of robots as well as computers could be greatly affected by increased scarcity in materials. A lot of the base materials in today's electronics aren't exactly abundant.
I think this is one of the problems with a lot of technological 'forward-thinking'. Issues like this tend to be swept under the rug as if supplies of crucial building materials were not a concern at all. I would say it's a very real possibility that we could run out of a particular material with no replacement/alternative, especially as the march of progress causes us to consume more and more and more of these source materials.
As nanotech advances we will gain the ability to replace more and more rare elements with common ones. In the far future there's no reason why our technology couldn't be based entirely on nanoscale structures made of only the cheapest, most abundant elements. After all, nature does it just fine.
msluyter said it better than I did above. The problem is the path from today to ubiquitous cheap automation of everything. In between, we have automation that is expensive, but cheaper than humans. What will happen during that gap, and how will society make it past that point to where everyone can enjoy such advances?
The endgame may be as benign as you're suggesting, but I don't think there's any way we'll get there without complications, if we get there at all.
"we [will] have automation that is expensive, but cheaper than humans."
I don't think that's true. The expensive part of robots is the hardware. I think we will have hardware able to replace humans long before we have the software. ASIMO's body is probably capable enough to do many tasks today. The hardware will become cheap long before the software becomes capable enough to replace humans in most jobs, and the software will improve gradually. People will have time to adapt.
Furthermore, this argument seems based on the premise that there's a huge underclass of people who can't possibly be trained in a skill once robots take the manual labor away, and that's an elitist view I simply don't agree with. America is already a country full of people who shun manual labor; only immigration fills the lowest level of jobs. Americans are not genetically superior to the immigrants who do our manual labor; we just have better opportunities. As robots make us more productive those opportunities will be offered to more and more people, and the number of workers willing to do manual labor will naturally dwindle.
"this argument seems based on the premise that there's a huge underclass of people who can't possibly be trained in a skill once robots take the manual labor away"
Who is going to pay for that training? I don't see any way for people who are currently unskilled laborers to make it through the gap when their current work is no longer available without any assistance. Moreover, plenty of skilled labor will be automated in the future. Nursing, for instance, requires a significant amount of knowledge to do competently, but most of the tasks nurses (as well as family practitioners) do will probably be automated in the next 40 years. Accounting? Skilled profession, but it could probably be automated. Anything that doesn't require creativity seems capable of being automated to me, even without drastic, unforeseen, internet-like advancements in technology. How are all of these people going to be retrained? What will they be retrained in?
"The hardware will become cheap long before the software becomes capable enough to replace humans in most jobs, and the software will improve gradually. People will have time to adapt."
I don't think so. Most of the problems that need to be solved to replace various forms of human labor are fairly similar. When the necessary technology is developed, several industries will start to automate simultaneously. Tens of thousands of jobs will be permanently lost annually. Even at a more gradual rate, I doubt there will be enough work to absorb all of those people.
To recap:
1) What jobs will people switch to?
2) How will there be enough of them?
3) How will people afford retraining when plenty of people barely have enough money to save today?
4) How will they retrain fast enough? Most of the jobs that seem difficult to automate to me require a college education, which many people aren't currently prepared enough for.
I think things will end up being okay, but it will take massive government intervention.
Your questions are about resource allocation, and the answer as usual is free markets. An argument about the efficacy of free markets vs. central planning would be offtopic, so let's just agree to disagree on this one.
Careful with your crystal ball there; you might end up sounding like the people who predicted similar things about computers. Robots will become very cheap in the future; they won't be exclusive to the "bourgeoisie".
"You can't just start making everyone work less"
Who said anything about making? That's far too authoritarian for my liking. People will choose to work less when they can achieve the lifestyle they want with less work. It will take a while for this to become socially acceptable, but I think it will happen.
I am less than 40, and I would be happy indeed if this became a problem during my lifetime, but I'm still skeptical.