Solutions with Henry Blodget

What’s it like to talk to a “digital twin” of a relative who died before you were born? How will the increasingly lifelike digital representations of people change how we grieve?

Amy Kurzweil deeply considers these questions in her graphic memoir, Artificial: A Love Story. It's about her experience helping to create a chatbot based on her grandfather. Amy’s father, Ray Kurzweil — a technology inventor and futurist — built the bot back in 2018. In this episode, we discuss how AI could change how we grieve, and complicate the very meaning of consciousness.
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More than three years into the AI era, the predictions of an AI job apocalypse are still coming fast and furious. Here are reasons to be more optimistic.

Harvard economist and researcher David Deming studies technology and the future of work. He’s dug into technological shifts of the past for clues about what might happen to the U.S. labor market now, and he’s even quantified the rapid rate of adoption of generative AI.

Deming doubts AI will cause a jobs apocalypse, but he does believe things will change. He tells us his ideas for how we can AI-proof our jobs.

Note: this conversation was originally recorded in the summer of 2025.
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Elon Musk says humanoid robots represent the biggest business opportunity in the history of the world. But what problems do these robots actually solve? And why do they have to look like humans?

We pose those questions and more to Dr. Jonathan Hurst this week, one of the pioneers of modern robotics. He’s the co-founder and Chief Robot Officer at Agility, which makes a humanoid called “Digit," which is actually working in warehouses.
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Dr. Robert Wachter has been a physician for decades, and he thinks that in the future, you might prefer an AI doctor over him (at least sometimes). 

Dr. Wachter is the Chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco and a best-selling author. To report his most recent book, A Giant Leap: How AI Is Transforming Healthcare and What That Means for Our Future, he spoke to over 100 experts across medicine and technology. The result is a compelling argument for how AI can unburden both doctors and patients, and broaden access to quality healthcare worldwide. 

We discuss the future of "digital twin" doctors, how physicians are already using AI, the risks of de-skilling due to an over-reliance on AI, and how Dr. Wachter is using ChatGPT when it comes to his own health.
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The U.S. is falling behind in its economic competition with China. One potential solution? An expansion of executive power. That’s according to investor and contributing New York Times columnist Steven Rattner. Rattner served as counselor to the Treasury secretary in the Obama administration; he was known as President Obama’s “car czar,” for leading the team that saved the auto industry in the wake of the financial crisis. Today, we discuss why Rattner’s recent trip to China convinced him the U.S. is not winning, and his practical ideas for how we can turn things around — and fast. 
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