Mark R. Hinkle has spent his career at the front edge of every major shift in enterprise technology — the early internet, the open source movement, cloud, containers, serverless, and now AI. He helped run the Linux Foundation and the Node.js Foundation, held executive roles at Citrix, and co-founded multiple startups. Along the way he trained thousands of people, from first-timers to CEOs, on how these technologies actually work.The Human Signal is the book that came out of a problem he couldn't solve in a newsletter.
For years Mark explained AI to business audiences — newsletters, guides, conference keynotes. The technical parts landed. The business cases made sense. But the human stakes of AI governance stayed abstract, and abstract stakes don't change how anyone behaves."A spec sheet can tell you what a routing algorithm does," Mark says. "It can't make you feel what it does to a driver who hasn't been home in three days because the system keeps finding her one more optimal stop. Fiction can. I wanted to put readers inside the decision instead of lecturing them about it."The Human Signal is his attempt to make those stakes something you feel rather than something you file away.
Mark lives in North Carolina, but he set the novel in Pittsburgh on purpose. The city has already lived through the transformation AI is now bringing to every sector — from steel to software, with all the human cost in between."Pittsburgh knows what happens when efficiency metrics decide who gets hurt. People there have been on the wrong end of optimization before. That history gives the book a weight it would never have in a made-up city or a Silicon Valley office park."
"I wrote The Human Signal for anyone who's wondered whether AI is something that happens to us or something we get to shape. The technology is complicated. The question underneath it isn't: Who should AI serve, and who gets to decide?The people in this book try to answer that — imperfectly, under pressure, with real consequences. I hope it helps readers look at the systems in their own lives with a little more clarity and a lot more agency."
Founder and CEO, Peripety Labs — a consultancy helping organizations put practical AI to work.Publisher, The AIE Network (TheAIE.net) — a group of AI publications read by more than 250,000 business professionals.Founder, All Things AI — a practitioner community and the Southeast's largest AI-for-business conference, held in Durham, NC.
Newsletter: TheAIE.net X: @mrhinkle LinkedIn: Mark R. Hinkle Conference: All Things AI — Durham, NC Monthly AI meetups — Research Triangle Park