I started my career at one of the first International Internet service providers, watching what I thought was the biggest technology shift of my lifetime—the moment the world went online.
I was wrong.
The AI boom isn't just another wave. It's the convergence of every technological advance we've made over the past three decades: the Internet, open source, cloud infrastructure, mobile computing, and distributed systems. Together, these made it possible to deploy intelligence—not just software—at scale.
I've been building through every phase of that evolution. From running a 2,500-person organization with a $100 million budget at one of the first internet service providers by age 29, to serving as Editor in Chief of LinuxWorld, holding executive roles at Citrix and global tech firms, and building startups backed by Cisco and Index Ventures—including Cloud.com, acquired for $300 million. I led the Node.js project, the backbone powering platforms like eBay, Uber, and Tinder. At The Linux Foundation and various startups, I helped position open source as the enterprise infrastructure standard while building developer communities that grew to hundreds of thousands of users.
Throughout it all, I've carried the same approach: beginner's mind, learn fast, build what matters.
That mindset led me to launch The Artificially Intelligent Enterprise, a weekly newsletter now read by over 250,000 professionals. It has grown into a full community, conference series, and education network. To support practical adoption, I created AIOS—the Artificially Intelligent Operating System—a framework helping business professionals use, manage, and evaluate AI tools responsibly.
But no matter how well I explained tokenization, prompt chaining, or retrieval-augmented generation, I kept hitting the same barrier: people didn't just want technical clarity. They wanted to see what it looks like when AI hits the real world.
So I wrote The Human Signal.
This isn't dystopian fiction with killer robots or sentient machines. It's grounded in real tools being used by companies today: large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, autonomous agents, synthetic media. Every system in this story has a real-world equivalent already in use—or imminent.
This isn't a warning. It's a tool for builders, leaders, and operators navigating a future where intelligence is scalable, distributed, and increasingly embedded in decision-making. It's for people asking: What should we automate? Where must humans stay in the loop? How do we scale without losing control?
Following the tradition of The Goal, The Phoenix Project, and The Cuckoo's Egg, this book uses character-driven storytelling to explain complex systems by showing them in action—for artificial intelligence. And yes, I used AI to write it—exactly as the book recommends. As a writing partner, editor, structure checker, and brainstorming assistant. I generated thousands of pages, testing and refining ideas. In the time it would have taken to write a few chapters manually, I produced a full working system of concepts.
The Human Signal is for anyone making smart decisions about automation, scale, and human judgment in a time of accelerating capability. Because the most important system we're building now isn't just digital—it's moral.
—Mark R. Hinkle