Complexity research will never become a single, encompassing theory-of-everything, or an independent discipline. It will thrive at the border between disciplines and in particular by interacting with engineering (thus approaching the 'science of the artificial' that Herbert Simon was promoting) and it will surely create several seed technologies.The authors say that we may see applications come from it, and if we do, now is that time. It will only exist along the boundaries of various disciplines:
I think the authors are too pessimistic. Complexity has been around a while, that's true. Has it delivered on its promises? Probably not. But then, the promises were too grand. (Nowadays, to get any funding the promises are always grand and overblown. It's the times we live in.)
Complexity is a new idea that still needs work. What's more, it's a new idea that needs development of the a mathematical framework so that it can be studied. The idea of studying local rules that create emergent behavior is so new that we don't have the mathematics to explain it. That's where complexity needs to go: to math and from there to applications.
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Ludwig Boltzman's tomb has on it both the cornerstone of a new physics (not to mention engineering and communication theory), but the sad, tragic reason for him taking his own life: which, in short, was that his ideas were *so* far ahead of their time that in *his* time very few recognized their worth! Complexity theory today is roughly where thermodynamics was about 20 *before* Boltzman came around! Science is a slow, cummulative process...though the idea that complexity, *as* a science exists on the boundaries of other entrenched "conventional" scientific categories is on the mark...I remind readers that *may* be a hint of a paradigm shift...but I will let science itself settle the matter, a few generations from now.
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