Simple. What “productive” entails has been evolving alongside tech advances.
A person today is expected to handle more work within a week that people achieved in a month a couples decades ago.
It has outside the UK, like the oft-presented US graph of earnings vs. productivity.
The issue in the UK is the flood of cheap labour which led to a reversal in automation e.g. car washes becoming manual again instead of machines.
As they mention in the article - the UK is almost entirely dependent on American Tech companies for cloud services, etc. so all those numbers end up better reflected in the American economy.
Really you need policies that drive a high-wage, highly productive economy - free education, high minimum wages (to effectively ban non-automation), scrap in-work welfare like tax credits subsidising unproductive companies, etc.
The purpose of technology is not to make us more productive. The ultimate purpose of technology is to take the burden of productivity away from us so we can live our lives without the chains of labor. Anyone telling you differently is likely your boss.
