Judge robots on their worst day, says Plus One Robotics CEO Erik Nieves

Supervised autonomy is a human-side design problem, not a model problem. A depalletising cell on a night shift, faced with reflective film the vision system has never seen, shows how what happens next depends on decisions taken months earlier. Nieves compared the role of human supervision to pilots who stay in the cockpit while the autopilot flies — a comparison that is useful because aviation wrote down, rehearsed and audited who takes control, when, with which information and after what training. Nieves warned against selling home and care robots as autonomous before they can cope with unpredictable human settings, and warehouses have an advantage: they can be open about supervision without losing face. A company-commissioned survey about humanoids, quoted in the same interview, found 26 percent of Americans asked named the lack of human judgement as their main concern, with discomfort highest for robots watching children at 52 percent, followed by surgery at 46 percent and caring for elderly people at 39 percent; the message travels to warehouses. The Italian standard UNI 11621-8:2026, published in April 2026, describes twelve professional role profiles for artificial intelligence, and Article 4 of the EU AI Act, Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 as amended by Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, asks providers and deployers to take measures to develop the AI literacy of their staff.