Who else has asked this question?
Named owners on the record. West, Brown and Enquist (Science 1997) set the transport-network premise the programme inherits. David Chalmers (2010) gave the singularity its first full philosophical treatment. Marcus Hutter (arXiv:1202.6177, 2012) set out to separate speed from intelligence explosion and consider possible bounds on intelligence. Bettencourt et al. (PNAS 2007) reported the exception where the ordinary pattern breaks, with an open end the programme picks up.
The lineage runs in three positions, each carried on the related-work page with the verdict attached.
The premise: West, Brown and Enquist, Science 276(5309):122-126, 1997, verdict ANTECEDENT. The transport network sets the terminal bound on growth. The programme inherits the mechanism and does not re-derive it. The exponent is contested in its details (White and Seymour, PNAS 100(7):4046-4049, 2003; Kozlowski and Konarzewski, Functional Ecology 18(2):283-289, 2004), and the contest is cited beside the antecedent because citing a contested result without its contest reads as naive.
The question: Chalmers, 'The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis', 2010, verdict ANTECEDENT; and Hutter, 'Can Intelligence Explode?', arXiv:1202.6177, 2012, verdict ANTECEDENT. Chalmers gave the singularity its first full philosophical treatment. Hutter set out to separate speed from intelligence explosion and consider possible bounds on intelligence, and derived no exponent, no reciprocal, no architecture dependence. Both belong to the lineage the programme inherits, and neither is a rival.
The exception: Bettencourt, Lobo, Helbing, Kuhnert and West, 'Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities', PNAS 104(17):7301-7306, 2007, verdict ANTECEDENT. The abstract reports that quantities reflecting wealth creation and innovation scale super-linearly with city size, whereas infrastructure quantities scale sub-linearly, and states that major innovation cycles must be generated at a continually accelerating rate to sustain growth and avoid stagnation or collapse. Infrastructure is the pipes; the brake in their account is entirely external and must accelerate forever; nowhere is there a limit from inside. The programme picks up the open end.
The programme's contribution is stated as an arrangement claim: the premise is West's, the question is Chalmers' and Hutter's, and what is claimed here is the replacement limit, its number, and its dependence on architecture.