[hombre_fatal]

I've seen similar comments about that scene over the years but I don't get it.

How is it naive?

It's clearly creative license to be more interesting and provocative. They could have just made his eyes glow and stuff happen on screen, but that wouldn't have been as cool.

[woolion]

This is not an example of the "rule of cool", there's a human and technological point that is made by this scene. However, because the movie drops most of the context from the original work, it is only something visually striking and impressive for most people. In-universe, this is considered almost nonsensical technology (for the obvious reasons that are invoked here).

[hombre_fatal]

It doesn't really matter what it's an example of nor what the real motivation was. Your emphasis that it's deliberate only supports my point that it's not a naive vision of future HCI from the 90s.

[hks0]

I don't think OP finds it not cool; otherwise he would had forgotten the scene long ago.

[el_cujo]

Yeah I think that kind of thing isn't supposed to be "predictive". The "rules" in series aren't very clear, sometimes they type stuff out into a keyboard, sometimes they connect a cable from their head, sometimes they just pass stuff around/hack basically just just "telepathically" without even needing the wire, they do whatever seems cool for a scene. I think the "splitting fingers" thing happens in one of the movies but also in SAC, but I think the point is just that it looks interesting and seeing the fingers do that and start suddenly typing quickly gives a sense of tension/urgency that you wouldn't get if it was just the character sitting back and staring at the screen (even if "in universe" they're able to work just as effectively that way)

[Brian_K_White]

Agreed the main reason is the point of the show is to be entertaining and visually interesting, and that is entertaining and visually interesting. Why do the robots look like spiders without any of the features of spiders that would actually be useful in a robot but look scary instead of cute to humans? It's not because it's a naive idea of what robots would look like.

But even aside from the fact that visual style outweghs realism in this work, it's not weird or remarkable anyway.

The robot has to type sometimes for the same reason you sometimes have to manually type a password into a keypad or your food order into a pos terminal even though you have a password manager in a phone with a dozen kinds of connectivity in it. None of your dozen forms of connectivity is compatible or available with any of the terminals dozen forms of connectivity. Even if you both have something the same plug, it doesn't mean you can use it.

You may also choose to do your "adversarial interfacing" the manual way even if you had a direct option available and even if you desperately wanted speed, simply for safety.