Jeff Bezos just bet $12 billion that you'll be able to support your whole family on a single paycheck again. his reasoning: AI will let companies make more stuff with fewer people and less money. and when something gets cheaper and easier to produce, and lots of companies can do it, they compete and the price drops. it's why a flatscreen TV that cost $2,000 a decade ago is $300 today. bezos thinks AI will do that to almost everything you buy. in his words, it raises "the basket of goods people can afford." your paycheck buys more without anyone handing you a raise. the problem: look at which prices have actually dropped. so far, AI has only made *digital* things cheap, like code and content. but the stuff that really eats your paycheck is *physical*. rent, cars, medicine. cheaper code doesn't lower your rent. that's exactly what bezos just spent $12B on. Prometheus, his new company, is building AI tools that help engineers design and manufacture physical products faster things like cars, machines, and medicine. the goal is to make building physical things as fast and cheap as writing software. if it works, 1 income starts covering what used to take 2. which is when his prediction kicks in: "perhaps one of those earners will choose not to be in the job market, so they'll become a one-earner household." or "some people who are working overtime will stop working overtime, because they don't want to." one paycheck covering a whole family again, like the 1950s.