Slang & Culture
Deus Ex Machina
Literally “god from the machine”: a plot rescued at the last moment by something that arrives from nowhere. In AI conversation it is used two ways — as a criticism of arguments that assume a future system will simply solve a problem nobody can currently solve, and, more loosely, as a joke about expecting salvation from software.
Origin · no single documented coiner
Ancient Greek theater, where a crane (μηχανή, mēkhanḗ) lowered an actor playing a god onto the stage to settle the plot; the Latin phrase is the form that survived. There is no coiner — Aristotle criticized the device in the “Poetics” and Horace warned against it in “Ars Poetica,” so it has been a complaint for roughly as long as it has been a technique.