Most discussions about artificial intelligence (AI) are characterised by hyperbole and hysteria. Though some of the world’s most prominent and successful thinkers regularly forecast that AI will either solve all our problems or destroy us or our society, and the press frequently report on how AI will threaten jobs and raise inequality, there’s actually very little evidence to support these ideas. What’s more, this could actually end up turning people against AI research, bringing significant progress in the technology to a halt.

In 2001 Jakob Nielsen warned about using pdf on the web in his famous article “PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption”. He said: “Forcing users to browse PDF files makes usability approximately 300% worse compared to HTML pages. Only use PDF for documents that users are likely to print.”