GIC director Josine Overdevest reflects on what Johannesburg’s failing traffic lights reveal about the relationship between human agency and technology. You can read the original here and we also publish it below.
“Thud!” I could feel in my gut that the sound reaching my 10th-floor apartment didn’t bode well. It stood out from the regular street hubbub. When I looked out the window, I saw an elderly lady lying in the middle of the road, clutching her bag close. The driver of the silver SUV that had hit her stepped out and rushed towards her.
I’m surprised that I don’t witness knock-downs more often in my inner-city neighbourhood. Making your way as a pedestrian in Johannesburg is a hazardous affair. Even when the traffic lights do work, they are often ignored by minibus taxi drivers who follow rules of their own. It makes me wonder what happens when a technology designed to improve human lives lets us down.
“And then you turn right at the next robot.” I remember my confusion when I tried following directions after moving here some twenty years ago. It had me looking out for a roadside R2-D2, or one of those blow-up arm-flying puppets. I soon learned that South Africans refer to traffic lights as robots, as I now do too.
The first traffic lights were installed at busy intersections in Johannesburg in 1929[1], they replaced the police officers that controlled the traffic with their hands. This created the impression that a human job, traffic control, was replaced with a machine. The original name “robotic traffic controller,” was shortened over time to “robots.”
But machines, like people, do not operate in isolation. As philosopher of technology Peter-Paul Verbeek explains in this short video, technologies are never neutral; they mediate how we act and how we perceive the world around us[2]. Traffic lights do not simply turn red or green. They also shape our expectations of one another on the road.
Another philosopher of technology, Bruno Latour, would call this the “script” embedded in the technological artifact[3]. A traffic light carries a prescription for use: stop on red, go on green. But scripts are only effective if people read, accept, and follow them, and of course, if the artifacts, work as they are intended to.
In Johannesburg they often don’t. The electricity grid has been severely constrained in recent years. This has led to load shedding, the official term for rolling blackouts. Whole city blocks are regularly in the dark for hours at a time. Traffic lights stopped working too. To ease the congestion at busy intersections, police officers and company sponsored points-people come into action during peak hours. At other intersections, people who you’d usually find begging at the roadside, proudly take on this job, and get paid by grateful drivers.
And the woes for traffic lights don’t end there: vandalism and theft also have an impact on the functioning of the robots, in some places they are more off than on.
The minibus taxi industry operates with its own informal traffic code, born from economic pressure and weak enforcement of traffic rules, a parallel system that other drivers increasingly adopt. When official rules aren’t enforced consistently, alternative rules emerge organically.
When walking in town, I know that crossing the streets is safer when the traffic lights don’t work: taxis and other cars approach intersections more cautiously, treating them like four-way stops. When the traffic lights do work, the ‘stop on red’ script too often gets ignored.
I find most pedestrians to be active and alert road users and, like them, I’ve taken to jaywalking as a safer option to cross the busy city streets. We have to figure out where best to cross the road, make contact with drivers to ensure that they see you, and because there is safety in numbers, we connect with others: “Come mommy, let’s go now,” says a kind homeless man, and together we get safely to the other side of busy Pritchard Street.
These informal networks of mutual care and vigilance didn’t emerge because of the technological failures, they reveal something that was always there. Perhaps the most resilient urban systems are those that work with these human instincts rather than trying to program around them.
The Johannesburg Roads Agency has recently announced its plan to turn the city into a “Smart Traffic City,” using adaptive signals, real-time data, and AI optimisation While adaptive signals might handle power outages better, they can’t restore respect for traffic rules or enforcement culture that makes any system work.
To me, this sounds like an instance of techno-solutionism: the belief that technology alone can solve human problems, without considering the broader implications or root causes.
The crucial question should not be what kind of smart signals could be installed and how they would operate, but why we have to install them at all. What do we expect them to achieve, and whose interests do they serve? One of the predictable answers is road safety for all users. Additional solutions that could contribute to achieving this goal are: repairing roads, repainting markings, creating zebra crossings, adding speed bumps, and simply enforcing the rules we already have. These measures are not high-tech, but they may well save lives.
To me, the robots of Johannesburg tell a larger story. They remind us that technologies may carry scripts, but that outages, theft, and human choices can undo them. They remind us that human agency does not vanish when machines enter the scene.
I saw that the old lady from my street was helped to her feet by bystanders, her bag still clutched tightly, and placed in the car of the very driver who had knocked her down. A moment of frailty, but also of care. It makes me wonder. When machines falter, as they so often do here, what do we fall back on? Perhaps not on more technology, but on one another.
But maybe that’s the wrong question. Maybe human agency isn’t the backup system, maybe it’s been the crucial element all along. What does that mean for how we think about the technologies we build?
The IFIP IP3 Global Industry Council (GIC) serves as the principal forum for employers and educators to engage with IP3 and shape the global ICT profession. Each month, they feature relevant and insightful ideas in IFIP Insights.
Image: A dysfunctional robot created by CoPilot
[1] https://topauto.co.za/features/125473/why-south-africa-calls-them-robots-not-traffic-lights/#:~:text=South%20Africa%20is%20one%20of,evolution%2C%20and%20devolution%2C%20of%20robots
[2] Peter-Paul Verbeek, What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design (2005). For a concise introduction, see his five-minute explanation of mediation theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVhrLwBNbvU
[3] Bruno Latour, “Where are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts,” in Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change (1992)
