Perspectives on the future of artificial intelligence and society range somewhere between a promised utopia and the next environmental apocalypse. This leaves workers and entrepreneurs in the precarious position of needing to master new technologies in order to compete, while grappling with the larger impact on Black and Brown communities.
“We as Black and Brown communities need to be learning, looking into all these technologies, how they can help and empower us, whether it be at the state level [or] it be a mom and pop shop trying to figure it out,” said Syntyche Clarke, chair of the Irie Jam Foundation, at her Tech Tribe event held at the Consulate General of Jamaica in Manhattan on June 4.
The increasing demands of the digital workforce seek people who are fluent in AI tools and modern media production, which threatens to widen the already existing racial wealth gap among Black American households across the U.S. by $43 billion each year, according to a 2023 McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility report. In addition to the systemic issues with employment rates, many workers of color are “overrepresented in roles most likely to be taken over by automation,” like office support, production work, food services, and mechanical repair, said the report.
“The education is important,” Clarke continued. “The onus is on us to hold officials accountable, to hold the persons who are behind companies accountable, bring them to the floor, and ask questions.”
Generative AI also has the potential to impact “high-mobility jobs” for Black workers that offer upwards of $42,000 a year in tech fields, such as cybersecurity, website development, IT, and data research.
This shift on the industrial horizon has inspired many Black and Brown small business owners and non-profits to take the reins of their economic futures, pushing themselves to be agile, innovative with funding, and adaptive at wielding both generative and agentic AI.
“When you are a Black woman in software engineering, I worked in banking and tech. I was often the only woman, the only Black person, and often … the youngest,” said Peta-Gay Clarke, founder of Women TechExchange (WTX) and Black Girls Code, about her experience leaving a corporate setting to create her own opportunities. “When you’re in those environments, you feel like a minority, but I wasn’t raised to be a minority. … I was raised to be solution-oriented.”
Antonio “Tronic” McDonald is the founder, CEO, & Chief Creative Officer at KUAMP Inc., a Black-run creative production agency. He believes that any technology, at its core, is about connecting people and not inherently intimidating if a user takes time to learn the tool and intended audience. He mainly uses agentic AIs, like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, to “pressure test” his ideas.
“What you’re doing is you’re actually getting wise counsel, if you will. And you understand how to pressure test your concept, your idea, and again, that could be anything,” said McDonald on the Tech Tribe event. “I just stress to understand the tools, don’t be afraid. Get after it. Understand that it’s there to help you and understand that basically in order to scale, we need these tools to do what we need to do.”
Black creatives in various fields are also finding themselves having to pivot when it comes to digital streaming platforms (DSP). Tanya Lawson, senior director of the International Department for Audiomack, said that her company provides a free platform for emerging Black, Caribbean, and African artists that can’t afford to promote their work on iTunes, Apple Music, Pandora, or Spotify.
“People are actually waking up in the morning and open up our app, seeing who we trend, seeing who we care about, seeing who’s hot in Jamaica, seeing who’s also hot in Haiti,” said Lawson.
Developing an overreliance on burgeoning technology carries inherent risks, particularly when it comes to the protection of an individual’s intellectual property rights.
“We have to remember that it is pulling from a huge data set, and the data set is pulling from [what] could be other people’s work, could be other people’s creativity. So while it makes your lives significantly easier, it can also make your life quite difficult,” said Attorney Karen Wilson-Robinson, Esq. on the panel. “And that’s where the human aspect comes in, because you still have to look at what the is that you’re getting. … Am I trampling on somebody else’s rights? Am I using somebody else’s work? And am I going to put myself in trouble by using that?”
“The internet roughly became public in 1992-ish. So like using Internet Explorer in 1996 is where we are now with AI. We cannot even wrap our brains around what is going to come because of this moment,” said Dr. Nicole Grimes, founder of Carib Biz Network.
New York State has taken more steps than most in the last few years to regulate AI through legislation when it comes to bias in hiring, publishing intimate images, deceptive deepfakes, protecting an individual’s likeness, using gen AI for city and state policy decisions, detecting suicidal ideation in AI companion tools, price gouging based on personal datasets, and disclosing AI products.
The state’s biggest law controlling AI is the Responsible AI Safety and Education (RAISE) Act that passed in 2025, just as President Donald Trump issued an executive order made for “minimally burdensome” federal AI regulations. And last week, the Responsible Data Center Development Act, which calls for a one-year statewide moratorium on new data center permits, passed through the state legislature and is awaiting approval from the Governor.
“We have a history of environmental justice communities that are filled with Black and Brown New Yorkers who know firsthand the impact of letting large corporations or fossil fuel companies build out infrastructure nearby,” said State Sen. Kristen Gonzalez, who chairs the New York State Senate’s internet and technology committee, which sponsored the bill. “So the idea that we can continue to build out large data centers and not have a plan for building out renewable energy comes at a direct cost to my own constituents because when we strain the energy grid, we rely, not only on fossil fuel infrastructure here, but on peaker plants and other dirty fossil fuel infrastructure that results in Black and Brown New Yorkers breathing in poisoned air.”
There are 28 large data centers in the New York State Independent Systems Operator (NYISO) queue, or the state’s energy grid, that add an additional 9,682 megawatts of energy onto the state’s already constrained and aging grid, according to Gonzalez’s office.
Gonzalez’s bill also includes mandates for environmental impact assessments with more community input, new rate classes for electricity and water usage, and labor protections during their development. This includes a community benefit program that would require any data center operators with peak loads of over 20 Megawatts to make investments in the impacted neighborhoods.
“All New Yorkers are bearing the costs of the heavy energy consumption of data centers. Black and Brown communities, which have continued to face disadvantages in a number of areas, face added strain as costs keep rising across the board for businesses — and energy is one thing every business depends on to keep its doors open,” said Assemblymember Clyde Vanel’s office.
Still, the city and state have seemingly strived for balance in encouraging AI and digital literacy through workforce development, education, and entrepreneur support programs.
