KEEPING TRACK OF EXPENSES

There are two very important aspects of a successful business. One is revenue and two is keeping track of costs. Many business owners work diligently on the first and neglect the second. In this day and age of computerization, there is no excuse for not keeping track of expenses. 

 

There are many good software programs that are cost-effective, even for the smallest business.

The best overall is  QuickBooks Online, the best for Micro-Business Owners is Xero, the best for Service-Based Businesses is FreshBooks; the best for part-time freelancers is QuickBooks Self-Employed and the best free software is Wave.

All these software programs are modestly priced and easy to use with some basic training and practice. 

Many small business owners use personal credit cards to make both personal purchases and business purchases. This can be a headache at the end of the business year and tax filing time.

A simple solution to cull business purchases from personal items is to keep a box the size of a shoe box (or a shoe box) in your office and after every purchase, drop the receipt in the box. For every purchase made for business purposes whether the purchase is made by credit card, debit card or cash, make sure you get a receipt. 

These receipts bundled, totaled, and stapled together and placed in a file folder at the end of each month provide definitive proof of purchase in the event of an audit or if an item purchased has to be returned for any reason.

At the end of the month, separate them into categories (IE Gas, coffee, meals, parking, gasoline, etc), circle each one on the credit card statement, make a copy of the statement and place that and the receipts in a folder for each month. 

I use the following simple form.to add up and total the different categories.

When you carry out your bookkeeping, enter each one as an expense, and bingo, no problem with your accountant or the tax man.

Using this very simple method of bookkeeping and receipt filing saves a great deal of time at year's end. 

 

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND CHILDREN OF THE 21ST CENTURY AND BEYOND

When I was a youngster in the latter part of the 1940s, my siblings and I would spend holiday time at a relative's farm. The only communication with the outside world was a telephone with the mouthpiece attached to the body of the phone and the receiver at the end of a cord. As the farm was miles from nowhere, the telephone was on a party line, a circuit shared by two or more subscribers.

As I remember, there were approximately a dozen subscribers in the party, each distinguished by a particular phone ring. When a phone call had to be made, the caller would crank a handle on the side of the phone a couple of times to reach an operator. The caller would then ask the operator to put the call through to a particular number. There was little privacy as any party member could listen in on any other party member's call.

Seventy years have gone by and the world is now connected with digital communication devices called smartphones. These phones incorporate artificial intelligence in many ways; voice recognition, facial and fingerprint recognition, camera object recognition and digital assistants with two examples being Siri and Alexa.

The words artificial intelligence or AI were first used by John McCarthy one of the "founding fathers" of artificial intelligence. He together with Alan Turing, Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell, and Herbert A. Simon supported the first academic conference and organized the famous Dartmouth conference in the summer of 1956 on the subject matter.

 However, the journey towards understanding whether machines could actually think for themselves began sometime before that date with the invention of the programmable computer in the 1940s. The workings of this new machine were based on mathematical reasoning and the deliberations and research behind it inspired some scientists into discussing the possibility of establishing an electronic genius, thus, an artificial intelligence.

Children born in the 1950s are now in their sixties. AI has been around for approximately fifty percent of its lifetime. Over the years, this generation and subsequent generations have adjusted to AI being commonplace in their lives; particularly those who live in the more advanced technological societies. Children born in the 21st century are born into a world where AI is integral to their daily work and personal lives. Voice-activated smartphones, AI in toys, GPS devices for family vehicles, smart homes, banking, and the internet are of the few of the applications most commonplace in the lives of children today.

Babies born in the 21st century no more think of AI as a wonder as they grow into childhood than children born in the '30s, '40s and '50s thought about radio. From the time they are old enough to grasp objects, they are subject to a broad variety of AI applications. AI is as much a part of kids lives today as radio was in the lives of children in the 1940's and 50's and television in the '70s and '80s.

As self-driving vehicles become more commonplace, children will be driven to school in autonomous school buses. Children in small rural communities will be taught by robot teachers or over the internet by intelligent bots. They will grow up in smart homes where instead of physically turning on and off lights, rooms will light up for them as they enter and darken when they leave. When they arrive home from school, AI technology will recognize them and open the door to the family home and lock it behind them where they will be greeted by their friendly AI home care bot. Children are now interacting with smart toys, refrigerators, entertainment centers, heating, lighting systems; all a part of their everyday life. And, AI researchers are now realizing that by paying attention to how children learn and process information, they can gain valuable information about how best to develop machines that learn.

Young adults and children born surrounded by digital technology for the past five years are defined as of digital natives. This group is growing exponentially. By 2025, digital natives are expected to comprise as much as 75% of the global workforce. With their comfort and knowledge of AI and machine learning technology, digital natives are now having a tremendous impact on the worldwide business landscape.

As well as the soaring number of digital natives there will be a predictable decrease in the price of digital technologies, an increase of their geographical extension and a drop in the age of users. In the most wired areas, it is now commonplace to see small children in different parts of the world watching the same cartoon or interactive children's program on their parents’ laptop, smartphone or tablet at a beach, a park or on a plane or bus, providing downtime for their parents. This is one aspect of using artificial intelligence and digital technology as a mobile child caregiver. And this is only the beginning.

Imagine children, immersing themselves into virtual reality worlds while robot nannies supervise them. Having AI friends or artificial teachers will become commonplace. As digital technology passes over our technological doorsteps, current and future parents must familiarize themselves with the latest digital tech aimed at kids to try to prepare for the impact AI will have on their lives. It is somewhat difficult for Millennial parents for children growing up with AI technologies simply take them for granted. Pre-millennial parents or digital immigrants as they are sometimes known as, still remember the time when portable, WIFI-enabled technology was the stuff of science fiction.

New parents of today and ongoing into the future need to teach their kids how to survive in the digital as well as the real world. The first generation to grow up in the 21st century will never remember a time before smartphones or smart assistants. They will likely be the first children to make riding in self-driving cars commonplace. As well, they will become the first human beings whose health care and education could be turned over to intelligent machines.

Futurists, demographers, and marketers are now beginning to agree on the specifics of what defines the next wave of humanity to follow Generation Z or Millennials. The term Generation Alpha now denotes children born into a fully-realized digital age. The term applies to children born since 2105. By 2025, Generation Alpha will account for 2 billion of the global population. These children are considered to be the most technologically savvy demographic to date.

Generation Alpha is born into the world of smartphones and tablets. They don't know or can't imagine life without them. A new generation of children's toys with personalities powered by artificial intelligence will give kids more than holiday playthings. Unlike electronic pets of the past, such as  Furby and Tamagotchi that sparked holiday crazes in the late '90s, the new robotic drones and droids on store shelves are comprised of genuine AI technology. They include face recognition; they respond to voice commands with reasonable consistency and have very sophisticated AI processors. They are microprocessors and computer systems designed specifically as hardware acceleration for artificial intelligence applications in the areas of machine learning, neural networks and machine visualization.

A very gifted little AI toy with a mind of his own is Cozmo. He is a real-life robot of a kind previously only seen in science fiction movies. This little toy has a one-of-a-kind personality that evolves the more a child plays with it. It will even nudge its owner to play and keeps kids constantly surprised. Cozmo and its more advanced cousin, Vector have been developed by Anki, a company founded by three graduates of Carnegie Mellon's robotics Ph.D program. These little tank-like robots are so full of personality that even AI experts have to take an educated guess at how intelligent their artificial intelligence is. As advances in AI progress, technology will progress from using pre-programmed responses to truly showing adaptive learning in its responses.

Parents will soon have to ask themselves the following question: Do we really want toys to grow with our children? The answer is yes; parents should. Not only will it be less drain on parents' wallets, but the new AI toys will incorporate optimal learning information because they can tailor their entertainment and messages to the level of skill a child exhibits.

Educators have long known that knowledge can be more lodged in a student’s brain when the student has to explain what they have learned to another student. In other words; peer learning. This was not anticipated in interactions with intelligent machines and is leading to a whole new field of development, not only in children but in machines that will learn for themselves.

Groundbreaking research in children's education is now indicating that a robot toy is more valuable to a child’s education, not as a teacher but as a student. In other words, by creating an intelligent robot that purposely makes mistakes and prompting the child to correct does more for the child’s education than lecturing them. 

Educational AI researchers propose that AI educational toys always need to display slightly less intelligence than their child user so as the child “teaches” the robot, the robot steps up its game and continuously challenges the child.

Where AI and the education and entertainment of children go from here, nobody knows. The only certainty is AI is here to stay.