These kinds of jobs being replaced by software is an increase in efficiency. Those people well by and large end up doing something else that's useful for society.
A digger (machine) replaced a lot of workers with shovels, but in the long-term it has clearly been good for society.
Has it? Those gains in productivity seem to be increasingly captured by the executive and capitalist class[1]. "Society" is 90% people who have not seen much benefit to their bottom line.
When something becomes incredibly cheap to produce, it also becomes incredibly cheap for consumers. The ditch diggers had to find new jobs, but now pretty much every house in the developed world has running water, electricity and increasingly internet connectivity, resulting for an increased quality of life for everybody.
I think one way to solve it is creating institutions that invest in the job cutting technology on behalf of workers. This way workers pick up the productivity gain and not the businesses that employ the technology.
It would be a massive shake up and would seem very seizing the means of production in a indirect way though.
The graph would very heavily depend on definitions, wouldn't it? Such a sharp change should easily be tracked down to a specific event. The entire economy doesn't just decide to to things differently in sync without an external factor. So, what happened at that time?
To be fair, looks like the graph starts to flat-line in 1972-1973. I think that lines up with Nixon leaving the gold standard in 1971 and going to China in 1972. It's possible that globalization may have ended labor scarcity in the U.S. and thus labor has no leverage to capture productivity gains.
A digger (machine) replaced a lot of workers with shovels, but in the long-term it has clearly been good for society.