Memorial Day TV deals aren't a robotics story, and that's exactly the problem

So we get TV deals instead.

I don't have hard data on how many actual robotics announcements happened this week versus how many shopping guides got published (if someone wants to run those numbers, my email's on the about page). But the ratio feels off. It feels like we're in one of those interstitial periods where the hype has cooled but the real progress hasn't materialized into headlines yet.

This is the part of the technology cycle that separates the serious coverage from the content farms. The serious folks keep digging, keep finding the smaller stories, the incremental advances, the policy shifts that'll matter in three years. The content farms pivot to affiliate revenue and wait for the next wave of announcements they can repackage.

The holiday content problem

Let me be fair for a second, holiday weekends are genuinely slow news periods. Companies don't announce things. Executives are at barbecues. PR people aren't returning emails (not that they return mine during normal weeks either, but that's a different complaint). Publications need to keep the lights on, and shopping guides do that.

But there's something almost comical about seeing "AI" used as a category tag for television deals. The TVs in question aren't even particularly AI-forward! They're just, you know, televisions. Good ones apparently, Samsung and LG make solid panels, but the AI angle is basically nonexistent beyond whatever upscaling algorithm they've slapped a marketing name on.

It's too early to say whether this represents a broader trend or just a slow holiday weekend. But I've been doing this long enough to recognize the signs of a beat that's struggling to find its footing. The robotics and AI space is genuinely important, probably the most important technology story of the next decade, and it deserves better than filler content.

So what

Look, I'm not naive. I know how this industry works. I know that page views pay salaries and that affiliate revenue keeps publications alive. I'm not going to sit here and pretend that Centre Robotics doesn't have its own commercial pressures (we do, obviously).

But there's a difference between acknowledging economic reality and surrendering editorial judgment entirely. When your AI section becomes indistinguishable from a shopping blog, you've lost something. You've told your readers that you don't actually have anything to say about the technology itself, that you're just here to move product during sale season.

The kids running these publications, and yes I'm going to call them kids even though some of them are probably in their 40s, they seem to have forgotten that trust is the actual product. The articles are just the delivery mechanism. When you fill your technology coverage with content that has nothing to do with technology, you're spending down that trust account.

I've seen this cycle play out before. Publications that chased clicks over substance during the quiet periods found themselves without credibility when the real news started happening again. The readers who stuck around were the ones looking for deals, not analysis. And those readers leave the moment Amazon offers a better interface.

Maybe I'm wrong about all this. Maybe the future of tech journalism really is just affiliate links with better SEO. But what do I know, I still prefer email to Slack. I still think bylines should mean something. I still believe that covering a beat means covering it even when it's boring, even when there's no obvious hook, even when the easy money is in shopping guides.

The TV deals will be gone by Tuesday. The questions about where robotics and AI are actually heading, those stick around. Someone should probably be writing about them.

Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 4 hours ago · 3 min