Using your analogy, let's say someone worked in the factory for a year before they were replaced by the robot. Are they entitled to completely stop working and earn that same salary for the next few decades? A year?
Something about your comment really struck me. In most sci-fi utopias, increasing automation was assumed to lead to cheaper marginal prices that gave everyone more leisure time. In reality the benefits from increasing automation (and globalization) have instead been naturally captured by those with the means (capital) to achieve them. Sounds a lot like we're either back on the road that Marx described where the few have all the capital or we're able to escape that fate by lowering the capital needed to gain those efficiencies (cloud computing, 3d printing)...
my analogy was not about people deserving the output of the factory due to having worked there. it was just an attempt to reduce the problem to a single system to illustrate how earning potential tends to leak out, and why that would actually be a good thing if only "earning" and "being provided for" were decoupled. the very fact that you can use the word "entitled" illustrates the basic problem in the current system, where it is physically possible for a small fraction of the population to produce enough for everyone to consume, but where that is being blocked by the notion that there is something immoral about getting stuff you haven't "earned".
