[RangerScience]

Ah! I hadn't noticed that you weren't the question's author.

I really like your summation that "can't get the capital in a capitalist society through the use of their obsoleted skill".

Arguably, the benefit of the cobbler could be a) highly custom small batch work, b) expertise to maintain the Elfbot, and c) a thinking mind behind the task. Elfbot will not improve by itself, the cobbler would.

[Kliment]

But you have to remember that the one machine has put a large number of cobblers out of work, and you need very few for the tasks you listed, so the total displacement is still problematic.

[logfromblammo]

The Elfbot was likely built by a cobbler, and sold to the burgomeister for immediate cash plus an Elfbot servicing contract. The machine owner only needs to rent a tiny bit of one ex-cobbler's labor to program new shoe construction techniques into the machine, and the person creating new shoe fashion patterns for it might not even be an ex-cobbler at all.

The human labor requirement has been slashed and burned for shoe-making, and the 99% of ex-cobblers that can't find work reprogramming and servicing Elfbots are busted back down to the pool of unskilled laborers.

The modern economy is increasingly asking unskilled laborers to retrain themselves to a different category of skilled labor at their own expense. Those categories of skilled labor may not even stay viable long enough to pay off the (re-)education loans, so those people may even be in exactly the same situation ten years later, except instead of just being broke, they will be broke, still in debt, and unable to borrow more for additional retraining.