The graph in the article really looks like as if value generation simply got decoupled from minimum age earners' labour at some point. Intuitively this makes sense. Sure, the invention of steam engine driven factories or something like the assembly line did drive productivity. However, you still needed human labour to actually produce the widgets. Now total productivity growth is largely driven by highly paid specialists producing textual descriptions of widgets and setting up automated systems that keep churning out the widgets themselves. Figuratively speaking, you don't actually need to pay anyone to push the button to make a widget every time you need one. So you don't.
