Wealth & Money Quote by John Podhoretz

“Robots have a rich and storied history in movies” is the kind of line that pretends to be a neutral observation while quietly doing rhetorical work. Podhoretz, a writer steeped in opinion and cultural combat, isn’t just commemorating a genre; he’s invoking a canon. “Rich and storied” isn’t descriptive so much as legitimizing, a bid to frame movie robots as something with lineage and seriousness rather than disposable popcorn gimmickry. It’s a critic’s move: plant a flag in continuity.

The subtext is that contemporary debates about AI, automation, and synthetic companions didn’t arrive from nowhere. Cinema has been running these thought experiments for a century, and it has done so with more honesty than our tech press releases. Robots on screen are never just machines; they’re proxies for labor fears (Metropolis), civil-rights anxieties (Blade Runner), Cold War paranoia (The Day the Earth Stood Still), domestic wish-fulfillment and dread (The Stepford Wives), and the uneasy desire to build something that will love us back (Her, Ex Machina). Calling that history “storied” flatters the audience: you’re not merely watching effects; you’re participating in an ongoing argument about what counts as human.

Context matters, too. In an era when “AI” is marketed as inevitable and benevolent, appealing to film history is a way to reassert skepticism. Movies have consistently treated artificial beings as mirrors that reflect our motives back at us - ambition, loneliness, control. The line works because it sounds like trivia while smuggling in a warning: we’ve rehearsed this future in the dark, and the plot twists are rarely comforting.