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In 1970, Alvin Toffler – who died on Monday at the age of 87 – published the now landmark book Future Shock, the first in a trilogy on the economic upheavals that the world was heading towards. He followed it up with a sequel, The Third Wave (1980), and expanded on his ideas in Revolutionary Wealth (2006). The author's passing was confirmed by his consulting firm.

In his book he notably popularised and defined the terms “future shock” – too much change in too short a period of time, and “information overload” - the clouding of human judgement because of an excess of data, which prevents them from taking decisions.

Future Shock went on to become a bestseller and was translated into multiple languages. It has sold over a million copies and continues to remain in print.

Toffler had a long career as a writer, journalist and management consultant. In the 1960s, inspired by the tales of American authors John Steinbeck and Jack London, both of whom involved themselves in adventures to collect material for their fiction, Toffler, along with his wife Heidi Toffler, worked on the assembly lines of mass production factories. Heidi would later collaborate with him on future books and was also his editor. She survives him.

The writer also worked as a freelance journalist for a while before topping the bestseller charts, publishing, among other things, an in-depth interview in Playboy with Russian-American author Vladimir Nabokov.

Toffler was known for his quotable quotes. Some of the popular ones:

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

“The future always comes too fast and in the wrong order.” 

“If you don’t have a strategy, you’re part of someone’ else strategy.”

Toffler was an early champion of science fiction. “Our children should be studying Arthur C Clarke, William Tenn, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury and Robert Sheckley, not because these writers can tell them about rocket ships and time machines but, more important, because they can lead young minds through an imaginative exploration of the jungle of political, social, psychological, and ethical issues that will confront these children as adults,” he said.

In this interview, Toffler examined how there are “different windows on each thing” by analysing a riot caused due to seeds in India, “In India, in July, there was a riot – angry farmers attacked an American agribusiness firm. Now, why did they do that? They said that the firm was selling them seeds at too high a price, considering the fact that that variety of seeds had originated in India in the first place. The company, of course, had taken the seeds and genetically enhanced them, which was, in fact, radically improving their productivity in India, by in effect injecting more information into those seeds. But the information is invisible. It took millions of dollars of research and development to do that, but the Indian farmers cannot see that. They cannot see or touch the knowledge, the information. They can touch the high productivity, but that’s not now, that’s after the crop comes in.”

In the video above in 2009, Toffler looks at where society is headed. "My wife and I are not magicians. People seem to think we are. We don't know the future. We think we know some parts or some changes that are going to take place and we link to think what are the options? What are the alternatives?"

Here's Alvin and Heidi Toffler talking about education.

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Here, Toffler analyses the future of digital media. About the unpaid or prosumer economy, he says “[this] economy is like being a doctor examining the patient and looking at the left lung and not recognising the that there’s a right lung.”

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Here's a documentary based on Toffler's debut. It's a paranoid techno-version of the future inspired by his work. For added listening pleasure, it's narrated by Orson Welles.

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While Toffler’s work was popular and even had some mass appeal, there was some criticism of his predictions and writing style. In a column in Forbes, social media analyst Shel Israel wrote why he thought Toffler was wrong, arguing that he didn’t feel technology had as bad an influence as the futurist suggested, noting, “More information means more freedom in every sense of the way and that gives us the ironic freedom of choosing to have less information. Technology may giveth, but it also can taketh away.”

Regardless, Toffler’s work has influenced disparate fields. From science fiction to film and even politics. Here’s comic artist Samantha Bee’s segment “Future Shock” on The Daily Show.

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