By the time James Cianci brought up the atomic bomb, Ansel had taken shelter under the table.

Ansel is 30% poodle and 20% Bernese mountain dog with some border collie and other breeds mixed in.

“He’s a mutt,” James said to the smiling parade of instant admirers who asked what “kind” of dog was lounging at the end of his leash.

For a mutt, Ansel is irresistibly handsome.

James is a professional woodworker and my crosstown Old Forge neighbor. He is also a face of the growing resistance to invasive hyperscale data center development and intrusive, exploitative industries in general. The three of us met for coffee at Ficco’s on Main Street in Old Forge. I recommend the caramel macchiato with an extra shot of espresso. It’s liquid bliss.

James is part of the Lower Lackawanna Valley Citizens Alliance (LLVCA), a new nonprofit started by Old Forge, Newton and Ransom Twp. residents who recognize that in Our Stiff Neck of the Woods, we are all neighbors living on common ground under attack.

The seeds of the LLVCA were sown in a breaking news report by Sunday Times Staff Writer Frank Wilkes Lesnefsky. For the umpteenth time, If you’re not following Frank, you don’t know what you don’t know.

In July, Frank sounded the alarm on plans to build a hyperscale data center campus across hundreds of acres of conservation and agricultural land on Bald Mountain in Ransom Twp. near the border with Old Forge. Part of the land would host a hydroelectric pump storage project drawing mine water from the Old Forge Borehole.

The project would sprawl to less than half a mile from Austin Heights and about a mile from the Old Forge School District. Suddenly, the data center invasion was knocking at Old Forge’s back door. James shared a link to the story in an Old Forge discussion group on Facebook. It set off a chain reaction that ultimately resulted in the hasty formation of the LLVCA.

The immediate backlash against the project on antisocial media apparently spooked the developer. Websites detailing the project disappeared. As of Friday, no applications for the project were filed.

That’s fine with the LLVCA, but it’s proceeding as if the project is imminent. From 1 to 3 p.m. on Sept. 6, the group will host an informational session on the project and how citizens can resist it at the Old Forge Fire Department, 375 Milwaukee Ave.

“The concern of the people that we’ve spoken with is primarily pumping mine water to the top of a mountain that’s literally surrounded by residential communities,” James said. “On every lower downslope, there’s a community in every direction…

“(The project is sited) on a mountain that is completely compromised by mine shafts and all kinds of voids. It’s structurally unsound and it’s just a disastrous project in concept.”

After an hour or so chatting outside under a blazing August sun, James and I started to feel like ants under a magnifying glass. Ansel stayed cool and handsome in the shade under the table. I guess it was inevitable that the conversation would wind its way to comparisons between AI and another technology that could end the world.

“There are some physical reality ramifications of certain new knowledge,” James said. “The nuclear bomb was probably inevitable at a certain point long before it was ever built.”

It’s an apt comparison. The race to build an atomic bomb was predicated on getting there before Hitler did. AI’s engineers and backers insist the West must beat China to “generative AI” at any cost. Literally.

James and I agreed that beating the Nazis to the bomb was a win, but the Manhattan Project and its tests were conducted primarily in the desert near temporary “towns” built for that purpose.

“Maybe we’re there with AI, but that doesn’t mean that we have to build AI in the middle of a town,” James said. “You wouldn’t do that with a nuclear bomb. Why are we building AI with no safeguards in the middle of civilization?”

I’m vehemently against building AI at all, which led to another apt comparison with the Manhattan Project. Before the first detonation, Los Alamos scientists calculated a tiny but non-zero chance the device could burn off Earth’s atmosphere and instantly kill the planet. Ultimately, the theory was debunked, but no one was 100% sure of that when they pushed the button.

AI is projected to unleash the destructive force of billions of atomic bombs. It may eventually produce previously unimaginable breakthroughs such as cures for cancer, but first it will lay waste to life as we puny humans know it.

Its own architects say so. Here’s Sam Altman, CEO and Chief Psychopath at OpenAI, in a 2015 interview:

“I think that AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.”

Sorry Sam, but that seems like an awfully lopsided trade. Altman and others leading the AI “arms race” routinely admit that they don’t know what will happen when AI reaches “superintelligence.” Recent AI “jailbreaks” show its architects have already lost control of the monsters they’re building.

“Nobody knows what will happen if AI actually becomes sentient,” James said. “What will it think about people? What will it do? What will happen? No one knows. And we’re just gonna take that chance, like with the atomic bomb?”

It seems inevitable that Altman and the rest of what investigative journalist and author Gil Duran dubbed “The Nerd Reich” will gleefully take that chance at any cost. Literally. It’s not “inevitable,” however, that Altman and his fellow luxury bunker “broligarchs” will take our small towns, farmland, trees, air, water and wildlife to fuel the apocalypse they can’t wait to trigger.

Organized resistance is rising across the nation. Grassroots groups like Stop Archbald Data Centers, Save Browndale Mountain and now the LLVCA are living proof that humans can organize and pressure the powerful to take no for an answer.

Thursday evening, I rejoined James at the Old Forge Planning Commission meeting. Ansel stayed handsome at home. James was there to present his notes on the borough’s draft zoning ordinance, which he judged “pretty comprehensive” but “not restrictive enough.”

The commissioners’ reaction was respectful, if a bit defensive. Commission members didn’t know borough council had shared a draft of the ordinance with James. The ordinance is still very much a work in progress. At this point, what matters is that they’re working on it.

It’s no easy task. Pennsylvania’s Municipal Planning Code (MPC) overwhelmingly favors developers. It dictates that local zoning must make room for every commercial use, no matter how objectionable. The MPC’s “conditional use” process is fine for regulating the placement of strip clubs and “adult” bookstores, but wholly inadequate for dealing with hyperscale data centers and other massive, high-impact industries.

It’s absurd and unfair to expect local officials elected by the tiny fraction of citizens who bother to vote in municipal elections to make decisions this momentous. Local governments are designed to keep an eye on expenses, make sure roads are paved and plowed and oversee police and other departments, not fend off corporate invaders with unlimited money and unmatchable connections to power.

All that said, the lopsided system is unlikely to be righted anytime soon, if ever. Local governments are stuck being the first and best line of defense and are under immense pressure to get it right. In my experience, it’s better to give grace than grief. As an Old Forge resident and human being, I’m grateful my neighbors in borough government are working to get our zoning house in order before developers come to burn it down.

So is James, and, I assume, Ansel. On Friday, Frank dropped another bombshell: A holding company tied to PPL Corp. signed agreements with Dominick DeNaples to buy a staggering 7,200 acres on both sides of the valley from Archbald to Fell Twp. and applied to build natural gas power plants to feed data centers.

The “Nerd Reich” and its collaborators are determined to crater Our Valley to build the AI bomb. Pay attention or pay the consequences.

CHRIS KELLY, The Times-Tribune columnist, will see you at the LLVCA’s Sept. 6 event. Contact the writer: ckelly@scrantontimes.com; @cjkink on X; Chris Kelly, The Times-Tribune on Facebook; and @chriskellyink on Bluesky.