By the way, procrastinating on internet may be the #1 factor that delays Singularity. Before we make a first machine capable of programming better machines, we may make dozen machines capable of distracting us so much that we will never accomplish anything beyond that point.
People need cool names to treat ideas seriously, so let's call this apex of human invention "Procrastinarity". Formally, the better tools people can make, the more distraction they provide, so there is a limit for a human civilization where there is so much distraction that no one is able to focus on making better tools. (More precisely: even if some individuals can focus at this point, they will not find enough support, friends, mentors, etc., so without the necessary scientific infrastructure they cannot meaningfully contribute to human progress.) This point is called Procrastinarity and all the real human progress stops here. A natural disaster may eventually reduce humanity to pre-Procrastinarity levels, but if humans overcome these problems, they will just achieve another Procrastinarity phase. We will reach the first Procrastinarity in the following 30 years with probability 50%.
...has finally been published.
Contents:
The issue consists of responses to Chalmers (2010). Future volumes will contain additional articles from Shulman & Bostrom, Igor Aleksander, Richard Brown, Ray Kurzweil, Pamela McCorduck, Chris Nunn, Arkady Plotnitsky, Jesse Prinz, Susan Schneider, Murray Shanahan, Burt Voorhees, and a response from Chalmers.
McDermott's chapter should be supplemented with this, which he says he didn't have space for in his JCS article.