Never let a good mind go to waste. Everywhere we look, we find idle retired folk just basking in the sun, contributing nothing to the nation's bottom line. Sure they worked hard all their lives and probably deserve some R&R, but a few hours a day of work can't hurt. Especially if the work involves nothing more than donning a pair of Virtual Reality goggles and playing some fun games.
Florida can look very different in 2024, with plenty of new Relaxo-Cafes popping up. This is where patrons go to get paid for hanging out. The games grandma gets to chose from are all designed to entertain her while secretly solving some other problem. Imagine a game based around Captcha, where she identifies difficult-to-decipher words that were last used when she was a child. The VR computer remembers her answers and compares them to a vast database of answers from all the other old people hooked into the system. Using this info, it can translate old scanned newspapers accurately without having to hire a team of experts to bore themselves at the task.
The power of the collective minds will be utilized in ways forms beyond mere information gathering. As grandma gets excited about all the difficult words she is getting right, her brain activity goes bezerk and she starts to give off significant amounts of electrical impulses. These impulses are gathered by sensitive probes that recover this spent energy much like regenerative braking in your Prius. This energy might be minuscule, but with so many retired old people hooked into the system, the electricity adds up. Now there is more than one way to efficiently suck everything good out of old people brains.