I’ve known all along I’m not qualified for this—it’s not really imposter syndrome if you really are a fake. - Charles Stross

Policing, as with all procedural jobs, expands to fill all the time and consume all the resources available for it.

There used to be an old joke in role-playing circles—it isn’t funny these days—that there were only a thousand real people in the UK—everybody else was a non-player character. Now it’s pretty much the reverse.

See? Interstellar colonization is easy! You just need to devote a visible percentage of the resource of an entire interplanetary civilization to it for several hundred years, placing it in the tireless and efficient hands of robots ordered to strive for the goal for as long as it takes.