Every day for over four years, Ramses woke up in his home in Barquisimeto, Venezuela, turned on his computer, and began labeling images that will help make self-driving cars ubiquitous one day. Through a microtasking platform called Remotasks, he would identify mundane objects that line the streets everywhere -- trees, lampposts, pedestrians, stop signs -- so that autonomous vehicles could learn to notice them, too. Like many Venezuelans, Ramses turned to microtasking when his country plunged into economic turmoil. The gig gave him the opportunity to earn American dollars instead of the local currency, which is subject to extraordinarily high inflation. "I would work Sunday to Sunday," Ramses, who asked to use only his first name for privacy reasons, told Rest of World over WhatsApp.

In a corner of Alphabet's campus, there is a team working on piece of software that may be the key to self-driving cars. No journalist has ever seen it in action until now. They call it Carcraft, after the popular game World of Warcraft. The software's creator, a shaggy-haired, baby-faced young engineer named James Stout, is sitting next to me in the headphones-on quiet of the open-plan office. On the screen is a virtual representation of a roundabout.