This excerpt from my upcoming book is an extension of the work I have published online on Artificial General Intelligence, Artificial General Cognition, Cognitive Artificial General Intelligence and AI Development. All of the previous content is included in The Artificial Superintelligence Handbook Series (vol. 1 & 2) available on Amazon and vol 3, including this article in full, scheduled for release early next year. Thank you to all who follow and are inspired to reach for the singularity. There is one truth in Artificial Intelligence design and development. There are lots of good coders and researchers but a huge gap between the development talent pool and financially viable commercial products.

Fox News Flash top headlines for Jan. 13 are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com "Star Wars" actor Mark Hamill was recently reunited with a long-lost piece of memorabilia from the iconic movie franchise that was gifted to him many years ago. Bookmans Entertainment Exchange in Flagstaff, Ariz., returned the soundtrack for the 1977 film, "Star Wars: A New Hope," to the actor known to many as Luke Skywalker. The record was a gift to Hamill from film composer John Williams.

Fox News Flash top entertainment and celebrity headlines for Dec. 19 are here. Check out what's clicking today in entertainment. The first "Star Wars" film, "A New Hope" was released 42 years ago in 1977. Since then, countless films, video games, television spin-offs and books have been produced to fill in every corner of the galaxy far, far away. What started out as a campy, low-budget sci-fi flick that was expected to flop, quickly grew into a juggernaut of a film franchise with plenty of content for everyone.

We introduce a new class of end-to-end learnable models wherein data processing nodes (or network layers) are defined in terms of desired behavior rather than an explicit forward function. Specifically, the forward function is implicitly defined as the solution to a mathematical optimization problem. Consistent with nomenclature in the programming languages community, we name our models deep declarative networks. Importantly, we show that the class of deep declarative networks subsumes current deep learning models. Moreover, invoking the implicit function theorem, we show how gradients can be back-propagated through declaratively defined data processing nodes thereby enabling end-to-end learning. We show how these declarative processing nodes can be implemented in the popular PyTorch deep learning software library allowing declarative and imperative nodes to co-exist within the same network. We provide numerous insights and illustrative examples of declarative nodes and demonstrate their application for image and point cloud classification tasks.

To put it mildly, news media has been on the sidelines in AI development. As a consequence, in the age of AI-powered personalized interfaces, the news organizations don't anymore get to define what's real news, or, even more importantly, what's truthful or trustworthy.

"So here we are…the most intelligent species on Earth. Unfortunately, things are about to change," Louis Rosenberg, Ph.D., founder and CEO of Unanimous AI Last month, Dr. Rosenberg addressed the sold-out crowd of more than 4,000 attendees gathered for the ninth annual TEDxKC event. TEDxKC – the largest TED event in North America – was hosted on Friday, August 18, at the Kauffman Center for Performing Arts in Kansas City, Mo. Reflecting this year's TEDxKC theme -- "Perspective: Where You Stand Matters" -- Rosenberg challenged attendees to consider the valid fears of artificial intelligence while offering a solution in the form of AIs modeled after swarms in nature. Swarm AI offers humans an opportunity to amplify their collective intelligence, not replace it.

We've gotten so accustomed to leaning on technology for every aspect of our day-to-day lives that we sometimes forget to marvel at the magic that lies behind many wonders that we now treat as commonplace. Being late for a meeting is a thing of the past--our mobile devices use our calendars to determine where we need to be and when, check on the current traffic and remind us in advance of when we have to leave so that we make it on time. The ritual of seeking recommendations for entertainment--be it novels or movies--has changed over the last decade. Today, the moment we finish watching a movie or reading a book, we are given dozens of suggestions of what we may like to watch or read next--suggestions so spot on target that there is no need to ask our friends. Behind these small miracles are hundreds of algorithms that analyse data about us and our environment, trying to discern our preferences and habits so they can customize the services we consume to better fit our requirements.

With the clock ticking down on the biggest film of his career, "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story," director Gareth Edwards wrestled with the high stakes ace up his sleeve: using computer graphics to digitally insert actor Peter Cushing, who died in 1994, into Edwards' new "Star Wars" film as the iconic villain Grand Moff Tarkin. "We were ultra-paranoid about it," Edwards told The Times ahead of the home video release of "Rogue One," which crossed the billion-dollar global box office mark just 39 days into its December release. "Even a month away, there was this feeling of, 'Is this going to work? Plenty of pressure already hung over "Rogue One," the first standalone side story in the "Star Wars" franchise. Anchored by a new heroine named Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), recruited into leading a team of characters on a mission to steal the plans to the Death Star, the prequel to 1977's "Star Wars: Episode IV -- A New Hope" would tell a darker, more violent tale than its predecessors in a galaxy far, far, away. "In the early conversations about the end of the movie, we knew we were going to hand it off in some form, like passing the gauntlet to Princess Leia," Edwards said of the film's final sequence, in which the Death Star plans land in Leia's hands, leading into the events of "A New Hope." In Austin, Texas, to speak at the South by Southwest festival last month, Edwards recounted the challenge. The task of creating a young CG Leia by digitally blending Carrie Fisher's face, and a single word of dialogue she delivered in 1977 -- "hope" -- with the motion-capture performance of actress Ingvild Deila, went to Industrial Light & Magic. Fisher, who died Dec. 27, did not film scenes for "Rogue One." "We knew we were probably not going to be able to get away without showing her without it feeling like a cheat," Edwards said. "You could do some gag where you just saw the back of her.

Mark Hamill is here to rescue your weekend with some good old-fashioned nostalgia. The "Star Wars" actor shared a photo Saturday morning of himself as a young Luke Skywalker posing in the Tatooine desert on the first day of filming "Star Wars: Episode IV -- A New Hope." He stands with his hands folded across his heart. "Taken in Tunisia early morning day [number one] waiting for my [first] shot (emerging from home for robot auction)," he wrote. Hamill has played Skywalker since 1977's "A New Hope," the first installation in the Star Wars movie franchise.

You probably didn't expect many surprises in Rogue One, the first Star Wars "side story" which details how, exactly, the Rebel Alliance acquired the plans for the Death Star. Indeed, the entire film seems to exist just to fill in a bit of background detail for A New Hope, our first Luke Skywalker adventure. But it turns out Rogue One is much more than an elaborate bit of fan service. Rogue One brought Peter Cushing, the legendary British actor who played Grand Moff Tarkin in the original Star Wars and passed away in 1994, back from the dead this past weekend as a CG character. His digital copy, which was portrayed by actor Guy Henry, isn't just a quick cameo, either.