PODCAST:
Jan. 23, 2026 ~ Chris Renwick, Lloyd Jackson, and Jamie Edmonds speak with Kentaro Toyama, a professor at the University of Michigan, about AI’s impact on jobs and wages.
A new Stanford University paper claims that artificial intelligence substantially reduces wage inequality, while raising the average wage prices by 21%, depending on three possibilities of how AI might impact the workplace.
However, University of Michigan professor Kentaro Toyama is casting some doubt on the findings.
“I am personally skeptical of this study’s conclusion as far as that goes,” Toyama told WJR. “It has some interesting things to its model, but it is ultimately just a model. Another thing to think about is that most studies like this are just one of dozens or possibly hundreds that look at the same kind of problem from different angles. As a scientific community, we usually have to look at the whole thing taken as a whole rather than assuming that any one paper is right.
“What this article is saying is that it’s actually quite interesting in how it models how jobs work,” he continued. “It says that AI has one of three possible impacts on jobs. One is it might automate it so that the job gets eliminated. Another is that it might augment it so that people doing the job are actually more productive. Then the third is that it might simplify it so that people with lesser skills could actually do the same job. A lot of this paper is based on a whole set of rickety assumptions that I would say (are) rickety enough that the final conclusion necessarily isn’t credible.“
