How A.I. Affects Black Health

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            As technology advances, developments such as artificial intelligence, or A.I., slowly replace foundations in education, the workforce, and even day-to-day life, disproportionately affecting the health of Black Americans in the U.S. This tool was marketed as the beginning of a new and simpler age. However, it has since negatively impacted several elements in our lives, including our access to renewable resources like clean drinking water, threatening our general and reproductive health. 

A.I. is an automated service (whether developed with software or hardware and software) that obtains key skills (e.g., critical thinking, problem-solving, etc) to ease the lives of human beings. A.I. could be a software service like Grammarly or a physical robot possessing a specific software on its interior, functioning somewhat like a brain, to complete tasks in the physical world.   

This has been presented in academic spaces where schools have been forced to include the usage of artificial intelligence in their grading rubrics, reducing some or all points from assignments that were completed with A.I. This transition has also resulted in some students being kicked out of higher education programs like doctorates, graduate, and undergraduate (Yang, 2025). This is primarily due to A.I’s persistent usage is being linked to rapid cognitive decline, reducing critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving skills, etc, which will challenge how our youth view and interact with the world around them (Chow, 2025). It’s also essentially cheating since A.I. is designed to know more information than a human being. A.I. could easily graduate from all of the programs that human beings are systemically designed to achieve. If a student is using this tool to fulfill academic requirements, they’re not learning what’s necessary to be deemed worthy of the degree and/or award. Colleges and high schools have since implemented automated software services to detect AI in assignments, but these effects have opened larger debates about the possibility of A.I. causing a rapid decline in high test scores, college (and high school) retention rates and admissions, and the overall intelligence of American youth. 

Due to the few educational resources in predominantly Black neighborhoods and discrimination, Black Americans have become more likely to experience challenges in academic and professional environments. Since Trump’s initial campaign, Black Americans have been disproportionately fired and/or harassed in workplaces while being accused of being “DEI hires” (McSwane, 2025). McSwane (2025) states that Trump’s initiative to slash the Department of Education resulted in Black women, making up 28% of that department, losing their jobs, and it doesn’t end there. These massive layoffs have taken income out of Black households and businesses and accessibility from Black children, which could ultimately cause our children to not obtain the education and professional developmental skills needed to take care of themselves (or future families). As Black workers lose their jobs, they lose access to healthcare, food, and reproductive options that allow their children to grow and become productive in the world.    

A.I. uses our planet’s renewable resources to generate profits for Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and other tech giants, provide automated services and cheaper labor to corporate giants, and ease the access of information to ordinary American citizens, allowing average citizens to develop high-paying skills related to the tech industry’s advancement. This could improve the income and stability of select households and provide the “American Dream” for a few. Alongside these improvements, A.I. does promote productivity. Average people have the opportunity for A.I. to clean their homes, provide support with assignments, and act as an alternative counselor without being able to spend thousands of dollars or engage in excessive physical labor. Instead of spending thousands of dollars on a human being to counsel and treat them for their mental health conditions, they have access to something like a robot that can provide them with some support.  

Although this development seems beneficial to our modern society, A.I. isn’t just an app on your phone or a toy for your kid. It will not perform the same way that any of those devices do because it needs data cooling centers to keep its internal drive and programs functioning on a consistent basis. For example, Elon Musk’s xAI service functions much like ChatGPT, allowing users to type prompts into a chat to receive answers, and sometimes generative images, from A.I. This application has massive and physical cooling centers in Memphis, Tennessee, and Atlanta, Georgia, two well-known, predominantly Black cities (Cosgrove & Kay, 2025). These cooling centers prevent the hardware that is needed to function the software from melting, causing a fire, delays, or shutting down completely. It’s somewhat like leaving over a million cables and chips plugged into your house without ever disconnecting them. You’d need a cooling center to prevent the unit from burning down or exploding.

The downside to this development is that the data cooling centers need water to provide the cooling effect. Meta recently purchased a $700 million data cooling center that was near a residence (Tan, 2025). This residence quickly lost access to water in their sinks, tubs, and toilets, leaving them unable to shower, drink fresh water, or clean themselves to this day (Tan, 2025). As their faucets run dry, so do their neighbors' in the same county (Tan, 2025). It is believed that this particular county, Newton County, will have no water by 2030, only 5 years after Meta developed their data cooling center in their county (Tan, 2025). One of the residents of Newton County exclaimed that “...nine companies had applied to build data centers in [their county], some asking to use as much as six million gallons of water a day – more than the county’s entire daily use” (Tan, 2025). This county isn’t alone, though.  

Data cooling centers in predominantly Black areas are stated to be larger and consume more water, reducing the availability of clean drinking water and contributing to the poor health of local Black Americans. ​​Fleury and Jimenez (2025) state that “...AI-driven centres could consume 1.7 trillion gallons of water globally by 2027”, only two years from now. That reduces our planet’s water supply to -1,698.614 billion gallons of water. 

Even though this effect will be global, it’ll affect low-income neighborhoods first since they have less access to resources to fight against big tech and corporate giants. Their health will also slow down their efforts since they’re likely to not have access to adequate healthcare, doctors, and alternatives. For example, during the Flint, Michigan, water crisis, neighboring Black communities relied on bottled water donations from good Samaritans for over a decade before their crisis was resolved. Without access to donations, the entire community would’ve been dissipated. Now that various communities will struggle to maintain water, that decreases the likelihood of donations, and possibly whole counties will be murdered by dehydration or diseases carried from corroding, dirty pipes.

Common health problems that developed during Flint, Michigan’s water crisis were outbreaks of Legionnaires’ disease, lead contamination, depression, PTSD, [etc] (Ruckart et al., 2019) (Cohen, 2022). As a result, 12 or more residents of Flint, Michigan, died while children were born and raised with developmental and behavioral issues (PBS, 2019). Lead is commonly linked to increased risks of learning and physical disabilities among children. Riley (2024) states that since Flint’s water crisis, more than 20 percent of the county’s youth are in special education or early-intervention programs in the Flint Registry. Aside from challenges with education, these children may also be more prone to mental health challenges like depression, PTSD, and anxiety, etc, in the future. 

As for women, lead contamination could significantly impact their ability to procreate. Kumar (2018) states that “lead exposure impairs hormonal synthesis and regulations…[It] also affects female reproduction by impairing menstruation, reducing fertility potential, delaying conception times, altering the hormonal production, circulation, affecting pregnancy and its outcome, and so on.” In short, lead contamination in women could cause them to develop hormonal conditions like PCOS and possibly cause them to become infertile. Flint, Michigan’s water crisis is a cautionary tale that we should follow closely to determine how to approach the future lack of water supply in Black neighborhoods due to A.I. 

Americans could protest and meet with policymakers to discuss the short and long-term effects of big tech’s abuse of our water supply. This could look like sending emails or letters to your state’s representative and/or Congress. If these appear to be unfavorable or insufficient, you could gather at protests related to climate change and attempt to spread awareness on social media platforms. This could inspire thousands around the globe to become inspired and change routines in their day-to-day lives to improve our climatic circumstances.  

On a smaller, individual scale, we could minimize or completely eliminate our usage of AI in our day-to-day lives, ultimately reducing its profit. One of the larger reasons that A.I. can function with such high-tech equipment and funding is that there’s a demand from corporations and average people. We should eliminate our desire for ease and return to a more manual lifestyle. Instead of using Grammarly or other spell-checking tools to review your assignments or paperwork, one could attempt to review and sharpen their literary skills in an English course or through watching relevant YouTube videos. There are free courses related to English that are hosted in public libraries and sessions on LinkedIn. It requires some research, but time is nothing when compared to clean drinking water and air. This practice could also improve cognitive activity in the brain and help to develop a long-lost art that could be profitable enough to tutor/mentor others. If you’re looking for a legitimate side gig and need another stream of income, this skill could be profitable, and you could easily become a tutor for youth and adults. 

Even though my previously mentioned projections are set to take place in the next 2-5 years, each day our environment is deeply impacted by drought, especially in Los Angeles, a city that has experienced numerous droughts in the past couple of decades. We should prepare and educate ourselves about surviving in harsh conditions as often as we can to spread awareness about our country’s or planet’s forecasted water supply under advanced technology. 

It’s important to remember that A.I. isn’t the only form of technology that is depleting our renewable and nonrenewable resources. Prasanthi (2025) states that “...digital activities make up about 4% of total greenhouse gas emissions and are projected to rise sharply.” Emails, alongside other digital activities like storing images, watching videos, and even Google searching, negatively impact the environment because they contribute to our carbon footprint, decreasing our atmospheric oxygen levels, making it difficult for us to function and behave rationally, and live healthy lives. With this in mind, we, as a collective working class, need to decide if our devices hold more value than a human’s life because that’s ultimately what this all boils down to. Since there are more of us than tech billionaires and corporate giants, we have the power to take small steps each day and possibly delay the harsh environmental effects that the 1% has helped to bestow upon us. Whatever steps we take now will determine the future health of our youth and the hormonal stability of Black women and girls as well. This doesn’t just consider nearby data cooling centers’ regions, but all over the planet.  

References

Chow, A. R. (2025, June 23). ChatGPT may be eroding critical thinking skills, according to a new MIT study. Time Magazine. https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school/

Cohen, G. (2022, September 22). Five years after water crisis, nearly 1 in 4 Flint residents has PTSD. BU School of Public Health. https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2022/five-years-after-water-crisis-nearly-1-in-4-flint-residents-has-ptsd/#:~:text=Published%20in%20the%20journal%20JAMA%20Network%20Open%2C,environmental%20health%20disaster%20in%20the%20country's%20history.

Cosgrove, E., & Kay, G. (2025, February 20). Elon Musk quietly built a 2nd mega-data center for xAI in Atlanta with $700 million worth of chips and cables. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/xai-elon-musk-x-new-atlanta-data-center-2025-2

Fleury, M., & Jimenez, N. (2025, July 10). 'I can't drink the water' - life next to a US data centre. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8gy7lv448o

Kumar, S. (2018). Occupational and environmental exposure to lead and reproductive health impairment: An overview. National Library of Medicine. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6309352/#:~:text=Lead%20exposure%20impairs%20hormonal%20synthesis,its%20outcome%2C%20and%20so%20on.

McSwane, J. D. (2025, June 4). Dismissed by DEI: Trump's purge made Black women with stable federal jobs an "easy target". Propublica. https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-dei-black-women-minorities-careers-jobs-dismissed

PBS. (2019, September 10). We found dozens of uncounted deaths during the Flint water crisis. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/interactive/how-we-found-dozens-of-uncounted-deaths-during-flint-water-crisis/

Prasanthi, S. (2025, June 10). Does deleting emails really help save the planet. Green Network. https://greennetwork.asia/public/brief/does-deleting-emails-really-help-save-the-planet/#:~:text=Environmental%20Cost%20of%20Email,the%20impact%20adds%20up%20fast.

Riley, S. (2024, April 25). The children of Flint, ten years later. Harvard Public Health. https://harvardpublichealth.org/environmental-health/the-children-of-the-flint-michigan-water-crisis-ten-years-later/#:~:text=He%20is%20among%20the%20more%20than%2020,or%20early%2Dintervention%20plans%20in%20the%20Flint%20Registry.

Ruckart, P. Z., Ettinger, A. S., Attisha, M. H., Jones, N., Davis, S. I., & Breysse, P. N. (2019). The Flint water crisis: A coordinated public health emergency response and recovery initiative. National Library of Medicine. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6309965/#:~:text=In%20January%202015%2C%20testing%20by,lead%20levels%20in%20their%20water.&text=Two%20outbreaks%20of%20Legionnaires'%20disease,with%20the%20water%20source%20switch.

Tan, E. (2025, July 14). Their water taps ran dry when Meta built next door. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/14/technology/meta-data-center-water.html#:~:text=A%20data%20center%20like%20Meta's,the%20area%20is%20drought%20stricken.

Yang, A. (2025, March 27). Kicked out of Colombia, this student doesn't plan to stop trolling big tech with AI. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna198454