I do not think that technology is our salvation.

Where Google and [Buckminster] Fuller overlap are in the potential for putting together disparate technologies in ways that can lead to something that might be a larger solution to a larger problem.

What we need to do is we need to say, how can - how can we operate independently in terms of putting together these various technologies in order to be able to make the world a better place?

Let's not be optimistic in the irreversibly irresponsible way that tends to happen with the crazies of geo-engineering. But let's talk about what sorts of changes we can make.

I became really absorbed but again I was at that point - and I still remain today - an outsider who has no interest in becoming an insider, let alone in what that insider perspective on [Buckminster Fuller] has come to be and come to represent.

I didn't grow up with [Buckminster Fuller]. I never met him. I was once close to meeting him as a child at a ski resort one summer. He died in 1983. Only in 1999 or so, 2000, when I was working as an editor at San Francisco Magazine, did I really come back around to that name because Stanford University had just acquired the archive.

Take the self-driving car and the smartphone and put those together and think about how to manage a smart grid because suddenly you have all of this data coming from those two mechanisms that allow for a much higher level of allocating energy much more efficiently.