They might be vertical, they might be horizontal, but otherwise, traffic lights have hardly changed in a hundred years. Red means stop, yellow means slow down, and green means go, a universal code ...
Cars that drive themselves are no longer just a concept you'd see in sci-fi movies imagining the near future. Companies like Waymo are already using self-driving cars, and you can ride in a robotaxi ...
Traffic lights help traffic flow by directing specific lanes to go and others to stop. Some are more complex and include signals for buses. But at the end of the day, they're devices with red, yellow, ...