This TED Talk features philosopher Michael Patrick Lynch, recorded live at TED-2017.

So imagine that you had your smartphone miniaturized and hooked up directly to your brain.

Now, if you had this sort of brain chip, you'd be able to upload and download to the internet at the speed of thought.

Accessing social media or Wikipedia would be a lot like, well, from the inside at least, like consulting your own memory. It would be as easy and as intimate as thinking.

But would it make it easier for you to know what's true?

Just because a way of accessing information is faster,

it doesn't mean it's more reliable, of course,

and it doesn't mean that we would all interpret it the same way.

And it doesn't mean that you would be any better at evaluating it.

In fact, it might even be worse because, you know, more data, less time for evaluation.

You know, something like this is already happening to us right now.

We already carry a world of information around in our pockets.

But it seems as if the more information that we share and access online,

the more difficult it can be for us to tell the difference

between what's real and what's fake.

It's as if we know more but understand less.

Now, you know, it's a feature of modern life, I suppose, that large swaths of the

public live in isolated information bubbles. You know, we're polarized, not just over values,

but over the facts. And one reason for that is that the data analytics that drive the Internet

get us not just more information, but more of the information that we want.

Our online life is personalized. Everything from the ads we read to the news that comes down our

Facebook feed is tailored to satisfy our preferences. And so while we get more information, a lot of

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