My phone's facial recognition technology doesn't see me, a black man. But it gets worse.

It was a sunny afternoon last month when my smartphone decided to ignore me. Well, it didn't ignore my African American self, but it did ignore the carved face of a black man in a sculpture I was trying to photograph. Instead, it bracketed the carving of a white man's face to indicate that it was "seeing" him, while not bracketing the black face in the center of the frame. This problem of artificial intelligence having difficulty with black faces has been around for at least a decade. In addition to causing issues with commonplace activities, like taking pictures, it also raises a bigger question of how we guarantee equal opportunity across race in a world run on AI. AI is already ubiquitous and powerful, and it becomes more so every year.