Futurist Alvin Toffler on trajectory of history

American futurist Alvin Toffler is probably the first, or at least the most well-known, social thinker who explored in advance in as early as the 1970s, the consequences and impacts, both positive and negative, of Information and Communication Revolution (ICR) on human affairs. His magnum opuses like Future Shock (1970), Third Wave (1980) and Powershift (1990) are still being sold in bookshops all over the world, including Malaysia which, I remember, he visited in the 1990s.

As a fervent consumer of his books from the 1980s and 1990s, my critique of Toffler's and, by extention, Tofflerites' central idea of change in human society is that it is technologically deterministic although it has also contributed invaluable insights, from the perspective of modern sciences, into the world-historic connections between the past, present and future of the human conditions.