Have you been “Rob Kahned” recently? Let me explain. Rob Kahn, FCAS, is one of the many world class writers who donate time and expertise to deliver AR to your inbox every other month. You may remember when Rob taught us how bad plus worse equals better or how innovation can easily be negative return on investment. I encourage you to read all Rob’s work, especially if you are curious about what the future may look like. His coverage of the dynamics around the California property market in January 2025 predicted much of what happened in the aftermath of the Palisades and Eaton wildfires — and Rob wrote it two months before the tragedies. The AR team noticed that history validates Rob so often, we now call it getting “Rob Kahned” any time history rhymes with our articles.
Make no mistake, getting “Rob Kahned” is not a good thing. We love Rob, and of course as actuaries our goal is to be correct in our predictions — but we also want to create a better future where our worst or most heartbreaking predictions never come true to begin with. Award-winning AR Developing News Editor Sara Chen, FCAS, developed a solution. In late 2024, Sara staffed a volunteer news desk to track marketplace and societal developments, develop high quality analysis, and digest what it means for actuaries. For example, this month’s Developing News ponders actuaries’ roles during soft markets, cloud service outages, regulatory change, and government shutdowns. If you read DN regularly, you are well on your way to being the person at your company making news, not breaking it.
In fairness, the world moves so quickly it is easy to get “Rob Kahned.” The year 2025 gave us zero hurricanes making U.S. landfall, one new U.S. president, and several AI launches, including ChatGPT 5, Opus 4, Gemini 3, and Sora 2. AR generally tries to take the long view, but sometimes we take a really long view. One of our most popular stories in 2023 was “Four Futures for Actuaries in the Wake of AI.” This was envisioned to be a decadal view, but most of it played out in less than two years. Now felt like a good time to revisit our forecast, so January’s AR provides “Four Futures for Actuaries in the Coming Age of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).” Read it, decide which future you like best, then go out there and create it.
