Aged Intelligence: How Women Are Using AI to Navigate Midlife

I am not equal I’m going to pretend I don’t have a bit of admiration for Shoshana Berger. She’s a former WIRED editor turned editorial leader at companies like Notion and IDEO. She is very smart and chic. Along with Nina Wildorff, she co-founded the Aged Intelligence Society, a trending event startup that hosts invitation-only dinner parties where women “use frontier tools to solve midlife problems.”

A practical approach to AI for women in midlife

Berger and Wildorff offer a refreshingly practical take on AI. “This is the most formative technology of our generation, and it’s here,” Wildorff says. “If you choose to ignore it, you are doing yourself a disservice.”

That thesis resonates. Their events have been oversubscribed from day one. The second dinner party they hosted was covered by the New York Times. Hundreds of women have contacted them to participate in future events. Their Substack, which shares AI tools and tips, quickly attracted more than 1,000 subscribers, including New Yorker writers and small-town mayors. Women outside the Bay Area are now hosting their own Aged Intelligence meetups.

They also practice what they preach, especially while juggling children entering college, aging parents, and an increasingly demanding business. “The cognitive and emotional labor of midlife is so heavy and intense that you need an assistant,” says Berger. “We actually need the National Guard, but in the meantime, AI will help us.”

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

How the Aged Intelligence Society began

Zoe Schiffer: How did the Aged Intelligence Society begin?

Shoshana Berger: Nina and I are both recovering magazine editors. We ended up attending a friend’s birthday party, and we were both smitten with Claude, our new French boyfriend. All the other women’s eyes lit up as we talked. They just weren’t participating in the conversation. At one point I said, “Nina, this could be a business, because we need all these women to do what we’re doing.”

Nina Wildorff: I was so nervous before my first event…

Shoshana Berger: We had to take beta blockers and ashwagandha because, wait, what we’re inviting are women who are ballplayers, really smart, incredibly skilled women, and we’re not AI experts. But we’ve been doing what we’ve always done as reporters: testing tools in ways that I don’t think a lot of women are doing.

There are many reasons why women withdraw from conversations, and we said, “No, no, if you want to be involved in the world of work, you can’t withdraw from this conversation. You need to be fluent.”