PERSON
Gary Klein
The cognitive psychologist who spent four decades in burning buildings, hospital wards, and military command posts learning how experts actually decide—and whose life’s work now measures the precise cost of handing their judgment to machines.
In 1984, Gary Klein sat across from a fire commander in Cleveland and asked how he chose what to do when he arrived at a burning building. The commander did not generate options, evaluate probabilities, or select optimal courses of action. He arrived, read the situation, and knew. Klein spent the next forty years building a research program around that moment of knowing—producing the
Recognition-Primed Decision model, co-founding the field of
Naturalistic Decision Making, and assembling the most rigorous empirical account of human expertise ever constructed from field observation. His subjects were firefighters, nurses, military commanders, chess masters, and intensive-care specialists; his method was the critical incident interview, thousands of them; his conclusion was that expert judgment is not the opposite of analysis but analysis compressed into
pattern libraries so deep and so fast they operate below the threshold of deliberation. When
large language models arrived capable of producing expert-level output without the years of direct engagement that built