Vernor Vinge introduced the term “singularity” in an op-ed essay for science fiction OMNI magazine, in 1983:

Social and technological prediction is very popular. This is reasonable. It seems that change is the only constant in our lives; we want to be prepared.

Yet there is a strong wall set across any clear view of our future, and it is not very far down the road.

We are at the point of accelerating the evolution of intelligence itself (…) The evolution of intelligence took millions of years. We will device an equivalent advance in a fraction of that time. We will soon create intelligences greater than our own.

When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding.

He revisited his idea with a clear explanation of its technological foundations and references tto his predeccesors, in his most well known and quoted article, “The coming technological singularity: How to survive in the post-human era,” presented at the VISION-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 30-31, 1993:

Progress in hardware has followed an amazingly steady curve in the last few decades. Based on this trend, I believe that the creation of greater-than human intelligence will occur during the next thirty years. (Charles Platt has pointed out that AI enthusiasts have been making claims like this for thirty years. Just so I m not guilty of a relative-time ambiguity, let me be more specific: I ll be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030.)

Which he reviewed with added comments in 2003:

Now in 2003, I still think this time range statement is reasonable.

I understand than 20 years later, with his human mind compromised by Parkinson, he still thought the same, and understood it was time to leave to watch the whole thing (technological singularity) happening from a different point of view, whatever than means.

Ad astra, Vernor Vinge!