This Week's Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through June 18th)

FUTURE OF WORK: Basic Income: A Sellout of the American Dream David H. Freedman MIT Technology Review "What's not to like about free money? Then there's the question of whether such a program might disconnect large swaths of our population from the positive aspects of working for a living--a potentially toxic side effect. And finally, there's little convincing evidence that large-scale technological unemployment is actually happening or will happen in the immediate future." ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: AI Is Learning to Meme Daniel Oberhaus Motherboard "Since memes and emoji are increasingly a part of what we consider human language (an emoji was the Oxford Dictionary's word of the year in 2015, after all), it was only a matter of time before someone applied neural networks to emoji to teach machines how to use them...Dango isn't just scanning your message looking for the word'horse' and then recommending the horse emoji. Rather, it is also taking into account the meaning of your message and other relevant factors, such as the fact that the eggplant emoji has, well, other meanings besides'eggplant.'"