The absurd in the talking traffic lights of São José dos Campos
It has long been prophesied, and by many, that technological progress, when unaccompanied by human progress, is bound to generate situations of sometimes intolerable absurdity, pushing the human being toward nihilism and toward a life without empathy, ruled by the “law of the machine”.
There are also, in smaller numbers, those who warned of the imminent establishment of a magical relationship between human person and machine (in my opinion Vilém Flusser is masterful on this). Magical in the sense that the human person, incapable of properly interpreting the machine’s signals and use, would come to have an almost divinatory relationship with their devices, using them and extracting results from them without really understanding how they work.
When we use a calculator to perform a calculation we do not know how to do without it, that is a kind of magical relationship in which the device saves us from ignorance. When, in the old days, we slapped the side of our television set to make the picture come back, we were also acting within a conflicted magical relationship — there was a “knack” to the slapping, a spot on the TV that tended to bring better results — a kind of twentieth-century technological mojo.
The extreme of this thought exercise is a world dominated by machines as portrayed in The Matrix and many other pieces of science fiction before and after it. Isaac Asimov used to describe very particular scenarios and occasions in this regard — when technology relegates the human person to alienation from nature and from humanity.
I thought about all this because of a stroll I took in the center of São José dos Campos — I love walking downtown and watching people.
In São José dos Campos – SP, the pedestrian traffic lights talk. There is a button the pedestrian can press to, supposedly, cause a programmed interruption in the flow of cars (there is yet another magical relationship with technology — what are traffic-light buttons actually for?). I am working from the assumption that the talking traffic lights address the blind portion of the population, so they can know when to wait and when to cross. When you press the button, a robotic voice immediately shouts:
– WAIT FOR THE GREEN LIGHT.
The robotic voice is an emulation of a female voice. But the precariousness of the device, that characteristic hiss of old radios, conjures the image of one of those mother superiors who take pleasure in punishing children. After a few seconds, another line, this one automatic:
– RESPECT THE ROAD SIGNS.
Now, what does that sentence tell us about the traffic, about the moment to cross the street? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. It is a lesson in morals and civility delivered by a talking pole. I feel personally offended as a citizen, and I would feel even more so if I were blind, because besides not helping me, this robotic voice speaks in the imperative as if it were the state’s robot-mother correcting our unpredictable human behavior. A few more seconds:
– PLEASE WAIT A MOMENT LONGER.
The time to cross the street is coming. I feel a little relieved and pay attention to the pedestrian signal. The little man turns green — time to cross. Do you know what our talking pole with its cybernetic-matron voice says at that moment?
NOTHING. Nothing. The light turns green and the pole goes mute.
In other words: at the exact moment when the blind pedestrian should in fact be informed that it is time to cross, our pole keeps quiet. Respect the road signs — but tough luck if you cannot see them.
It becomes evident that this apparatus was installed as mere demonstration, exhibitionism, demagoguery — the clumsy, inadequate, non-functional application of a technology that could be useful. I even think of money laundering. And it goes, inadvertently, turning the urban experience into a somber labyrinth of devices and people bumping into one another, weaving insane and groundless relations.