[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.