Brendan is also Jewish. Al isn’t, but given that Al didn’t seem to have named any of his robots, I guess we can assume Brendan had a hand in naming the models?

Tsade is the robot with the elongated face that Brendan gave Lucile to help around the office. The last time we saw a name on him, someone had changed his name to “Tuba”.

And yes, I too think that this is the person Brendan called to find out if they’d produced Al — the one whose phone contact icon was a black square. That person spoke in a very stilted way, suggesting they might be an AI.

who is also sentient, for what is worth…

Robots + Hebrew = Golem symbolism, I’m guessing…

Oooo… I need to go back and read that now.

Whoa, there’s a lot of truth to this. Must be rather dehumanising (well, you know what I mean) to be treated as an object worthy of a series of renaming jokes – what better way to notice that everyone else hasn’t considered that you might deserve self-determination? I hadn’t gotten quite that far, but I’d wondered in an idle way whether Tsade would run off with the extra sample face that Brendan built with the stuff Villas shipped to him. Terribly easy to see an AI as a nifty machine when they have an amorphous metal piece for a head.

It was jarring to me too until I rralized they were talking about the Robot With Many Names and not Sulla!