Sasha Chislenko, when he was still alive, took this idea in the opposite direction:

Traffic signs are a great invention embodying the ancient dream of humanity: they tell you where you should stop, when you can go, what is around the corner, and some of them - traffic lights - even predict what will happen in near future. That's about all I would like to know on my life path. People dreamed of knowing these things before traffic signs existed, and they looked at nature trying to interpret natural events as "omens" - signs put on their path by some intelligent agencies, with the purpose to tell them where they should go and what they can expect to happen there. Alas, nature wasn't very helpful here, even though eventually people learned to recognize some phenomena as precursors to others. So with time, people decided to take things into their own hands, and to augment natural locales with clear indicators of what should be happening here, what is around, where are other similar places, and provide any other information that may be of value to their visitor.

[. . .] A similar process once happened to primitive biological organisms, which used to suffer from lack of guidance and tended to "fall into the same pits" over and over again. Road signs would have been quite useful then as well, but putting them up was too hard. So the poor critters developed little attached signs that would see the situation and tell the bodies what is going on and what they should do. We call these "smart signs" sensors and brains[. . .]

(Sasha was deeply interested in technologies for collective epistemology. I wonder if we would be in as bad a position as we're in now if he hadn't died... Which also means I wonder if there's anyone else we—("we", who?—) should be taking unusual effort to keep alive.)