Last week a video showing 60-year-old Peter Abbott screaming abuse at TV producer Samantha Isaacs gained a viral audience, after Abbott was found guilty at Poole magistrates court of "using threatening words or behaviour to cause alarm, distress or fear of violence". In the phone-filmed video, Abbott is seen snarling and shouting as he presses his face up against Isaacs' car window. He looks as if he's channelling the Harry Enfield character Angry Frank, so cartoonishly aggressive are his contorted facial expressions and confrontational behaviour. Not only did he hammer on Isaacs' car but he also called her a "slag" and a "whore". When another male driver pointed out the terrible optics of bullying a woman, he replied: "She's a fucking bloody annoying woman."

When someone cuts you off on the motorway, do you take a deep breath and turn up the radio, or put your foot down and get right up to their bumper? Road rage is all too easy to slip into, but it can become a real problem when it starts to impact how people drive. Scientists from the University of Warwick have identified some of the most common behaviours of aggressive drivers. They say these will help self-driving vehicles spot and react appropriately to road users who may have lost their cool. It comes after one study found that women are more likely to suffer from road rage than men.

Melanie Mitchell, a professor of complexity at the Santa Fe Institute and a professor of computer science at Portland State University, acknowledges the powerful accomplishments of "black box" deep learning neural networks. But she also thinks that artificial intelligence research would benefit most from getting back to its roots and exchanging more ideas with research into cognition in living brains. This week, she speaks with host Steven Strogatz about the challenges of building a general intelligence, why we should think about the road rage of self-driving cars, and why AIs might need good parents. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Android, TuneIn, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, or your favorite podcasting app, or you can stream it from Quanta. Melanie Mitchell: You know, you give it a new face, say, and it gives you an answer: "Oh, this is Melanie." And you say, "Why did you think that?" "Well, because of these billions of numbers that I just computed." Steve Strogatz [narration]: From Quanta Magazine, this is The Joy of x. Mitchell: And I'm like, "Well, I can't under-- Can you say more?" And they were like, "No, we can't say more." Steve Strogatz: Isn't that unnerving, that it's this great virtuoso at these narrow tasks, but it has no ability to explain itself? Strogatz: Melanie Mitchell is a computer scientist who is particularly interested in artificial intelligence. Her take on the subject, though, is quite a bit different from a lot of her colleagues' nowadays. She actually thinks that the subject may be adrift and asking the wrong questions. And in particular, she thinks that it would be better if artificial intelligence could get back to its roots in making stronger ties with fields like cognitive science and psychology, because these artificially intelligent computers, while they're smart, they are smart in a way that is so different from human intelligence. Melanie's been intrigued by these questions for really quite a long time, but her journey got started in earnest when she stumbled across a really big and really important book that was published in 1979.

I am behind the wheel of a Nissan Leaf, circling a parking lot, trying not to let the day's nagging worries and checklists distract me to the point of imperiling pedestrians. Like all drivers, I am unwittingly communicating my stress to this vehicle in countless subtle ways: the strength of my grip on the steering wheel, the slight expansion of my back against the seat as I breathe, the things I mutter to myself as I pilot around cars and distracted pedestrians checking their phones in the parking lot. "Hello, Corinne," a calm voice says from the audio system. The conversation that ensues offers a window into the ways in which artificial intelligence could transform our experience behind the wheel: not by driving the car for us, but by taking better care of us as we drive. Before coronavirus drastically altered our routines, three-quarters of U.S. workers--some 118 million people--commuted to the office alone in a car.

This is Sedric, Volkswagen's newest concept for the future of autonomous driving. Sedric (as in self-driving car, get it?) VW claims that Sedric is the first vehicle to be designed for fully autonomous driving "from scratch." Of course, it's important to note that Sedric is just a concept, meaning it does not exist anywhere but in the imaginations of a few VW engineers and designers. Which may explain why Sedric looks so angry.

Automotive manufacturer Faurecia created a smart car seat that can tell when you're being driven to the brink, and it responds with fresh air and a massage. The Active Wellness seat contains sensors that detect the driver's heartbeat and breathing patterns. A smart biometric sensing system crunches the numbers to figure out how the driver is feeling. "[The seat] allows us to understand something about your heart rate, your respiration rate, and then analyze that to really understand your stress level," Faurecia advanced innovation manager Matthew Benson told CBS Los Angeles. When the seat senses that the driver is stressed out, it automatically responds with a specific massage pattern designed to calm the person down.

A new report claims drivers will likely treat autonomous cars like mugs once we start sharing roads. The report, from Good Year and the London School of Economics, surveyed nearly 12,000 drivers. The majority of them said they would be able to take advantage of autonomous cars – knowing they would be forced to stop or give way in confrontational situations. This meant that drivers would be able to take advantage of their'safe' nature and cut them off or force them to wait at junctions. But others are not so sure. Andrew Lee, head of market intelligence and analysis at Octo Telematics says that it's more likely autonomous cars will be driver towards the edges of what cars can do.