Epistemic humility is being humble with your assumptions about understanding. It’s recognizing that you may not know something—may not know a great many things—and that this is natural and okay.
It’s fall 2020, and if you live in the urban environment and go out to dine, chances are that your restaurant has replaced paper menus with printed QR codes. In fact, the pandemic has accelerated the use of QR codes for anything “contactless” form retrieval, information reference. It is paradoxical because QR codes were frequently mocked as the primary showcase of “futile technology”.
The QR code stands for Quick Response and is just a 2-dimensional barcode. These 2D barcodes store information such as webpage URLs, text, and contact information. The information in QR code can be static (coded once and always stay the same) or dynamic (so we just encode a URL). A QR Code has the capability to remain scannable even if it is somewhat damaged – up to 30%. A lot of modern QR codes contain images, which is possible because of this error correction - the scanners just treat the images as errors.
I was surprised to discover so many artists have experimented with QR codes. Some turn the QR code itself into art while others embed code into their art to provide dimensionality of information.
In early 2010th multiple museums have tried using QR codes as a replacement for image caption. However, those efforts were frequently mocked and were largely unsuccessful. I saw a more contemporary version at the Barnes foundation that used image recognition instead of QR code - point your phone at the image and you get detailed information about the painting. So it seems that we don’t really a QR code per se, rather we need “gates” in our physical world to get us to the digital world. QR codes just happen to be convenient. But what is awe -aspiring is that this technology is free and available to anyone to use. No patents, no leasing, no pay per services, as in 1994 Denso Wave decided to make it publicly available for anyone to use. Whether you are an owner of a small hair salon or an international conglomerate, you can create as many QR codes as you need for free.
While rarely trying to make technology predictions I am actually anticipating the increased usage of QR codes and potentially some interesting interplay with AR (Augmented Reality) resulting in a mishmash of the physical and digital world. In the end, QR codes are just doorknobs into our rich digital world.
Further Reading:
Bernard Silver and his friend Norman Joseph Woodland created the first Barcode. These are their sketches
Procrustean bed
Procrustes was son of the Greek god of Poseidon. He took great pleasure in fitting his house guests into an iron bed. To make the guest fit, he would either amputate their feet or stretch them on a rack. A Procrustean bed is a behavior that doesn’t fit its intended purpose; it only perpetuates a superstition.
