Yes, because QA
Source: I have been tester for about 9 years.
Before you let your robot to run into the wilderness letting him kill help humans, you need to know if the robot knows what is a human and what is not.
So in order to test the robot, their software and/or hardware will be tested by humans. Or another automated tests. And you bet there will be nagging testers telling you all the time that they need to have to know if a robot recognized human or not.
Yes, you might put off that "Can you put green rectangle about the human whenever it sees a human?" request for a few releases, but those pesky testers will complain about how difficult their life is and how pricy testing the robot vision without green rectangles around humans is.
Why does the HUD staysstay, you might ask? Because removing that feature costs time, and moreover the whole robot would have to run through yet another QA round to realize if removing such feature didn't break anything else.
To sum it up:
- The robot is initially programmed by humans
- HUD is nice feature and it helps (human) testers to test the robot
- Robot itself doesn't really need the extra features added to HUD. It would recognize human even without putting green rectangle around them
- No, I cannot tell you if I tested soon-to-take-over-the-world robots. That's still under NDA
Hasta la vista, baby
HUD: Heads up display
QA: Quality Assurance
NDA: Non disclosure agreement