Alvin Toffler, the US author of the best-selling books Future Shock and The Third Wave, has died at the age of 87.

Born in New York, Mr Toffler worked as a welder and mill worker for four years before writing for Industry and Welding, which went on to become Welding Design & Fabrication.

A ‘futurist’ before the term had even been invented, he went on to coin the phrase ‘the information age’ and wrote more than a dozen books charting the shift from manufacturing-based economies to those driven by knowledge and data in the 20th century.

Leading politicians such as China’s Zhao Ziyang, Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew and South Korea’s Kim Dae Jung studied his work diligently, as Asia’s emerging markets increased in global significance during the 1980s and 1990s.

The US historian Alexander Woodside wrote in 1998: “Where an earlier generation of Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese revolutionaries wanted to re-enact the Paris Commune as imagined by Karl Marx, their post-revolutionary successors wanted to re-enact Silicon Valley as imagined by Alvin Toffler.”

Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk said that Mr Toffler “helped to foster the belief within Silicon Valley and elsewhere that the function of technology firms was not just to make money, but to change the world.”