AT its zenith, England was known as a nation of shopkeepers, where trade followed the crown; this was however interchangeable — the East India Company accumulated an empire, many times the size of the mother country. While some daring soldiers and civil servants were rewarded with fancy titles for colonial conquests, the real beneficiaries of the British empire were textile traders, mine and mill owners, and diamond merchants, who built their fortunes by helping the British government in looting colonies. Thus, while the common Englishman, mostly a miner or sharecropper, wallowed in poverty, the lords, ladies, and knights, lived in vast estates, with a retinue of servants, and all the luxuries that money could buy.

The US, where capitalism came “on the first ships,” was built on the foundations of private property, acquisitiveness, and individualism. Now led by a billionaire president, who has no qualms about receiving an aircraft as a gift, that too from a foreign government, and who is accused of a whole gamut of financial improprieties including massive unethical trading in crypto tokens and stocks, the country seems to have slipped into a grotesque parody of capitalism.

Nowhere was it so apparent as at the humongous $86 billion IPO of SpaceX, a company largely owned by Donald Trump’s friend, Elon Musk — by far the world’s richest man. The stated objective of the IPO was establishing a one-million-person colony on Mars, establishing other outposts in space, launching data centres the size of football fields into orbit, and also outdoing rivals Anthropic and OpenAI in the race to make money from artificial intelligence. According to classical political science, except the last goal, the rest are best left to the government.

Musk has become vital to Ukraine’s war efforts. Currently, the Polish government pays Musk $50 million per year for the use of the Starlink system by Ukraine, but given political vicissitudes, Ukrainians are always haunted by the fear of Musk cutting off satellite communications, which has kept their hospitals, military bases and troops online. Matching his boss, Trump, in braggadocio, Musk warned that the “entire front line would collapse if I turned it (Starlink) off.”

Artificial intelligence (AI) has already taken away entry-level accounting, customer service, reporting, and administrative support jobs. Signi­ficantly, in the first ten months of 2025, AI was responsible for 11 lakh layoffs in the US tech sector. With an investment of $700 billion, and with much more in the pipeline, AI is sure to endanger the future of ordinary US techies, yet AI is being actively promoted by uber rich tech czars.

Last year, Musk announced that Tesla will manufacture the AI-enabled humanoid Optimus robot, which will be capable of working 24X7 with five times the productivity of a human being. Optimus will retail for $20,000 to $30,000 — the price of a mid-sized car. Advent of the AI-enabled humanoid robots, promised by Musk, would mean that all tasks, even those involving complex decision-making, can be automated, and completed, without human interference. With higher-order machines controlling lower order machines, the need for humans in a futuristic office, or factory, will be minimal.

Just as most countries had enacted laws to regulate human genetic research, and are in the process of regulating the use and development of AI, with persons like Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Demis Hassabis, and even Musk, publicly calling for immediate regulation of AI, it is time that the development of humanoid robots, and space exploration, by private individuals, is also regulated. In the alternative, we could face catastrophic disruptions — brought about by a plethora of Frankenstein’s monsters — which could destroy humanity. Anthropic, the present leader in AI technology, has called for stricter regulation of AI. Anthropic publicly warned of mass joblessness, and even creation of new bioweapons, should AI remain unregulated — only to be ignored by the US government. Earlier too, Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft had warned: “Artificial Intelligence will evolve to become a superintelligence. We need to be mindful of how it’s developed and ensure that it aligns with humanity’s best interests.”—The Statesman (India)/ANN

Published in Dawn, June 29th, 2026