The Social Society Helping Women Join the AI Boom — SkimNews
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- Aged Intelligence Society, co-founded by former WIRED editor Shoshana Berger and Nina Willdorf, hosts invite-only dinner parties where women "solve midlife problems using frontier tools," and events have been oversubscribed since launch — the second dinner was covered by The New York Times.
- The group's Substack quickly gained over 1,000 subscribers, including a New Yorker writer and a small-town mayor, and women outside the Bay Area have begun hosting their own satellite meetups.
- Events cap attendance at 8 to 12 people, with attendees bringing laptops and a "midlife quandary" to work on during 15-minute "library time" sessions, while the founders walk the room "sherpa-ing" people through prompts and tool choices.
- Berger fed her consulting proposal to Claude, which told her she was undercharging for the scope of work; she doubled her rate and reported that "the client did not blink."
- At one event, a woman whose mother had an Alzheimer's diagnosis fed a 300-page insurance packet to AI and got back a confirmation of long-term care eligibility plus a drafted appeal letter to the insurer.
- The founders explicitly park ideological debates about AI's threat to creatives or job displacement at the door, focusing instead on what Berger calls reducing "administrative load" and building fluency.
- Berger frames the target audience as women over 40 specifically, arguing their "discerning taste" and "strong bullshit meters" make them ideal AI users — calling the technology "the new washing machine" for time-strapped women.
Why it matters: Women over 40 absorb the bulk of the "sandwich generation" cognitive load — aging parents, launching kids, stalled careers — and the founders' thesis is that this demographic's skepticism and life experience make them unusually good at prompting and pressure-testing AI outputs. If that holds, it reframes who the most valuable early AI adopters are, and suggests a peer-driven, in-person model (cheese, wine, laptops) closes the fluency gap faster than self-serve tutorials.
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