On New Year's Eve 1999, I threw a party. Not because I was feeling festive, but because I didn't know what else to do. I was running tech support for one of the biggest internet service providers in the country, and I had no idea whether our systems would survive midnight. None of us did. The Y2K bug, a two-digit oversight written into code decades before I was born, threatened to bring down banking systems, power grids, air traffic control. Everything that ran on software, which by 1999 was everything that mattered.
So we turned down Dick Clark and watched our east coast data centers instead. I stood there knocking back whiskey and cokes, sans the whiskey, waiting to see if I'd be raising a glass to celebrate or drown my sorrows.
The clocks ticked over. We survived. Y2K didn't become a catastrophe because millions of people, from programmers and engineers to managers and regulators, manually reviewed automated systems, coordinated across borders, and made human judgments about which risks mattered most. The biggest technology crisis of the century was solved by governance, not code.
Meanwhile, Global Crossing, the OpenAI of its era, had IPO'd at $19 a share, peaked at a $47 billion market cap, and poured $15 billion into a fiber network spanning twenty-seven countries. By January 2002, it filed for bankruptcy. If that arc sounds familiar, it should. Fifteen billion dollars couldn't buy what governance gives you for free.
I've spent twenty-five years building through every wave that followed: internet, open source, cloud, mobile, distributed systems. Somewhere along the way I learned something that changed how I saw the whole industry: non-technical people aren't just supporting technology. They're a critical part of building it. Each wave set the stage for the next. And all of it built toward artificial intelligence.
So I wrote The Human Signal.
Some will call the premise far-fetched. Maybe. But we've spent decades perfectly at ease with AI harvesting humans as a power source and transferring their consciousness to a simulated world, or a ragtag group of hitchhikers navigating the galaxy on improbability and towels. By that measure, I'm playing it conservative.
Every system in this story has a real-world equivalent already in use, or just over the horizon.
The questions this novel explores are the same ones I couldn't stop asking that New Year's Eve, scaled up and accelerated: What should we automate? Where must humans stay in the loop? How do we build systems that survive their own midnight?
Mark R. Hinkle