A couple of questions:

It currently appears that further automation concentrates income to a smaller and smaller group of folk, how do you propose we mitigate that?

While automation will provide for an abundance of some things, we are running out of other things (oil, rare metals, bluefin tuna). How should scarce resources be allocated?

> It currently appears that further automation concentrates income to a smaller and smaller group of folk, how do you propose we mitigate that?

You know, every time I read such discussions I think that the communists probably have it right. The answer is to make the means of production (i.e., the robots) owned by the community rather than by individuals.

This could even be achieved without changing any laws: http://www.demos.org/blog/how-about-us-sovereign-wealth-fund

Yes, that's what everybody would like, I think. The article rightly points out that (in our present capitalist structure) this type of society exclusively benefits the robot-owners: why should my robot do heavy lifting for you?

The economically powerful see the benefit and the economically weak have no access to robots and no escape route from poverty.

Question "why should my robot do heavy lifting for you?" is pointless, because it literally costs you nothing to let your robot do the job. The only reason we now have to pay for anything is because there's always someone (human) who spent his time and effort to make it. Once everything is made by robots it can cost nothing

At a very minimum, there are opportunity costs.

I can make my robot work for myself, to build myself a palace, or I can make my robot work for you, to build you a simple home.

A capitalist is only motivated to do the latter because they get something beneficial in return - if I already have a robot who can work for free, then you may have nothing much more to offer me: I would have to be really an unusually altruistic capitalist to bother to help you.

I understand the concept of a post-capitalist utopia, but we have to get through the intermediate stage first.

i believe that the post-capitalist utopia is on a disjointed line to the current world (i.e., there is no step, short of complete jump, that will bring us from here to there). The reason i have is that people either have a way to escape the poverty trap or they don't. I argue that most don't (the rare ones who do are exceptions). This way, the poor either eventually die out (not likely - welfare keeps the group of poor people limping on while not giving them any way out), or somehow, a truely altruistic person/group (the likes of Bill Gates, but much much more resourced) ends up being able to carry the entire burden of resource production for each and every single person ; ala the big jump i mentioned above.

That's not entirely true. There are nonrenewable material and energy costs that went into making said robot. It may be a sunk cost, but it's not zero.