“First Word [Singularity]”, Vernor Vinge1983 (transhumanism)⁠:

[much expanded in 1993] Yet there is a stone wall set across any clear view of our future, and it’s not very far down the road. Something drastic happens to a species when it reaches our stage of evolutionary development—at least, that’s one explanation for why the universe seems so empty of other intelligence. Physical catastrophe (nuclear war, biological pestilence, Malthusian doom) could account for this emptiness, but nothing makes the future of any species so unknowable as technical progress itself.

…There is an important reason why this process won’t level off. We are at the point of accelerating the evolution of intelligence itself. The exact means of accomplishing this phenomenon cannot yet be predicted—and is not important. Whether our work is cast in silicon or DNA will have little effect on the ultimate results. The evolution of human intelligence took millions of years. We will devise 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. This singularity, I believe, already haunts a number of science fiction writers. It makes realistic extrapolation to an interstellar future impossible.

…Surprise—it is a future that will happen as soon as superhuman intelligences are created. And given our progress in computer and biological sciences, that should be between 20 [2003_21ya] and 100 [2083] years from now.

…Marvin Minsky, of MIT, has suggested we regard these new beings as our children—children who will do still better than their parents did. Sometimes this point of view is enough for me, often it is not…Falling into the singularity is admittedly a frightening thing, but now we might regard ourselves as caterpillars, who will soon be butterflies, and when we look to the stars, take that vast silence as evidence of other races already transformed.