put up their houses in, we are going to continues to see this framed happening are all across the african continent. it's estimated it will cost billions of dollars to fix the damage caused by the latest flooding in south africa and environmental groups. a severe weather has killed half a 1000000 people in southern africa, in the last 6 months alone. for me to mila al jazeera johannesburg, south africa. ah! you what you deserve me, sir? hello, robert, reminder of our top stories, french president monroe by craw, has been reelected comfortably beating far. i challenge at marie le pen. microns acknowledged dissatisfaction with his 1st term. it is a good one on the local, but yet i know for many of our compatriots who chose extreme right. their anger and disagreement which led them to vote for that project. well, we must find a response was that will be my responsibility and the responsibility of those who

surround me, mothers, because the voted this election means we have to consider all the difficulties people have lived through and to respond to their anger and disappointment. my dear friend, today you made a choice for humanism, for ambitious independence for our country and for our europe lived in a concession speech. both in the pounds said the result puts her party in a strong position for the upcoming legislative elections. are there any reason why they mean what we've been declared dead a 1000 times and a 1000 times history has proven wrong. those who predict are wished for our demise . in this defeat, i can't help feeling hopeful this result is proof of a great to fire on the part of the french people on that are leaders in france and europe cannot ignore it. proof of a widely shared wish for a great change. the french people have expressed tonight a wish for a strong opposition against a manion. i call one that will continue to defend and protect them. the other will i've stated, protest by far left groups against macros. victory, right,

please moved in unused hagens to disperse demonstrations in paris. now there were similar scenes in the north western city of glen and elections and civilian have delivered a shock. the new prime minister, the environmentalists party, political nuclear, robert globe, one the most. faith said he's not expected to full mikaela and government club had to make his victory speech from isolation at home and to contract uncovered 19. and you, as president joe biden has accepted an invitation from his roles, prime minister of tolley bennett, to visit the white house as bide, will make the trip in the coming months. the truly to spoke on the phone about the 10 situation of the axa most compound it occupied east jerusalem. this'll be biden's 1st visit to israel as president, and you can follow those stories on our website at al jazeera dot com. i'll be back with more news in half now. next on out there, it's upfront to stay with us. frank assessments. what are the political risks of

panic? russian oil, a gas for western leaders, pull sanctions on russian energy exports for us was informed opinions. france is not abandoning to fight against jedi, still resumed media debt going to be attaching from nisha and from chad critical debate. could china actually help in russia's invasion of ukraine in depth analysis of the days global headlines inside story on al jazeera, artificial intelligence is the future of war. tech giants and governments are already partnering to produce lethal autonomous weapons. but will these so called killer robots unleash a new kinds of danger? okay, they make war safer. as supporters claim that conversation is coming up. but 1st, with recent world events, the danger of nuclear warheads, spite nuclear weapons are the most dangerous munitions on earth, with the potential to kill millions, to level cities and destroy the natural environment for generations to come. yet, even with this knowledge, we are no closer to achieving total nuclear non proliferation. in fact,

the topic continues to be debated. wise that will ask this weeks headliner, beatrice fit executive director of the 2017 nobel peace prize recipients, the international campaign to abolish nuclear weapons, beatrice van, executive director of the international campaign to abolish nuclear weapons. i can thank you so much for joining us on up front. i can was a driving force behind the 2017 treaty own the prohibition of nuclear weapons to outlaw nuclear weapons entirely for which your organization was awarded a nobel peace prize. 122 countryside onto the treaty, but none of the nuclear powers did, nor did any of the nato countries. and since then, we've seen russian nuclear forces on a high alert level in the u. s. withdrawal from the ran deal increases in india in pakistan's nuclear warhead stockpiles, and a bunch of other recent developments which are the main countries in the world

right now preventing the complete abolition of nuclear weapons. well, thank you very much for having me and i can. yeah, i mean, the treaty was a great accomplishment, but of course the big elephant in the room, of course, is that the 9 yukon states and the other countries that are participating in exercising and practicing and hosting new come up as of the territory have not get during the treaty, and this was really the reason why we pushed for this to to happen because we saw that things were getting worse. with huge monetization programs from the nuclear. i'm states, all of them are upgrading and increasing the nuclear arsenals and much more a nationalistic tendency. they are threatening each other much more, and that's kind of arms face that is happening right now. and of course, now we see how russia is basically threatening the world to use nuclear weapon if anyone interferes with its invasion of ukraine. so this is really

a very serious moment, but it's also exactly why we push for this treaty or having these weapons forever. we will see them being used eventually we see a very dangerous situation right now. the risk of nuclear produce has increased. i'm not saying that it's likely to be used, but i think we have to be aware that we are pushing closer and closer to that point where it's been actually going to be used. and we have to drastically change. and it is the nuclear on states, and it's the nuclear allied states and nato, for example, that really have to lead this charge because we cannot be this vulnerable for one person in the world anymore. well, let's talk about one of those nuclear arms states. russian president vladimir putin actually ordered nuclear forces to be put on a high alert level. ok, what in your estimation is the likelihood of nuclear war? i wouldn't say that it's likely i still hope that the threshold for using nuclear weapons remains very, very high for all countries. but the more i see, of course, the war developing in ukraine, seeing the threat doesn't pay the great picture for,

for what we could imagine happening in ukraine as well. and also sort of like a very irrational leader under a lot of pressure feeling like there's no way out for him. i'm very worried about this. i'm also very worried about accidents. mistakes, things that we didn't expect could happen. we just saw a few weeks ago in the mistakenly launch a missile on, on pakistan by accident. and having be situations happening right now on the beast tension. if that would have happened between a, a u. s. base and russia person, i mean, the consequent that could be absolutely. we could stumble into nuclear war. and of course we see the situations like north korea testing miss. also i to be again, south korea saying that it was nuclear weapons. we've seen bela roo. say that they could station russian nuclear up on the territory. we've seen poland say a week of the station american to come up with us. there is so many variables here

and so many uncertainty, tuition, and we have just been so vulnerable for just relying on these people, mainly men, to always get it back to never make a mistake to always behave rationally and basically putting the face of our entire humanity in the hands of someone like put in and just hope for the best. it's absolutely unsustainable. escalation has been happening for a while now. in 21900 president trump also withdrew the u. s. from the intermediate range nuclear forces treaty or the i n f, which mark the 1st time that both the u. s. in russia had agreed to actually reduce their nuclear arsenals. in fact, when this happened, you stated a quote from has fired the starting pistol on cold war 2. so to what extent does move by the us undermine nuclear disarmament? and perhaps even compromise global nuclear security. i mean, we've seen this has been a trend over the last 10 years. we've seen the dismantling of international legal

instruments. we've seen violation of international instrument not on one side, but from many different sides before trump withdrawal from the i n f treaty from the van via which the russia violates a lot of these kind of instruments. we've seen them barley, the chemical weapons convention as well. we seen a really negative turn, and then you add this very kind of trend of nationalistic sort of match, show leaders threatening sort of rhetoric, an arms race, massett, investments in nuclear weapons. and you get the kind of tension and i think that this is exactly what we want. but if we continue down this path, we are on very dangerous territory. and i think that it's not just one decision here. and there that, you know, makes it so dangerous, many different, over time, a complete deportation, depreciation of disarmament, diplomacy of multilateralism, working together and seeing actually reduction of nuclear arsenals as increasing

global security. and in the meantime, you have the rest of the world without nuclear weapons, feeling hostages in this kind of situation. i think that there's a lot of countries around the world now looking at the situation like, do they just decide over the face of my country to do? we have a say in this, and that's exactly what the treaty or the prohibition on nuclear weapons is about taking control for other countries to say actually we have to get to disarmament. we have to band and eliminate these weapons. let's talk a little bit about the iran deal because talks have resumed to implement the around the also known as the j. p. o. a. when trump withdrew from the deal in 202018, excuse me. you called it disastrous. and you said it was essentially a pretext for the u. s. to wage war on iran. do you anticipate a return to the iran deal and from a global security standpoint? what's at stake if the neil fails? well, when the trump administration withdrew from the treaty, it had

a very sort of, i think so malicious intent with that it was a functioning deal. it really had strict verification and sure that iran was not developing nuclear weapons. and the u. s. just intentionally sabotaged that, but this standard that was in the round, it was the highest that we've ever seen. an international agreement with verification on nuclear energy facilities. and the i e, a verified that iran was implementing it. they are not developing nuclear plants. we know what they're doing. so i think that was just intentionally trying to portray the treaty as bad when it was actually a very high standard treaty. and it was really a huge diplomatic achievement to get it. so when it was broken, of course it's really hard to put these things back together and you have undermined trust from iran, from all the other countries that were part of this treaty. so i think it's a, it's a real, it's a really good sign that these countries are still trying very hard to get it back together to get a treaty back together. and i think that it shows a commitment from all sides. and i really hope that they will succeed. now,

proponents of deterrence, they argue that the best way to prevent nuclear war is to build a nuclear arsenal on both sides of a conflict. so that their use would lead to the mutually assured destruction of everyone. that's the language it's always being used. you only other hand argue that the best way to prevent nuclear war is to make sure that there are no such weapons to begin with. how is nuclear deterrence theory flawed? and how can we approach disarmament in a way that makes the world safer? i mean, new to the terrace theory is it's so strange, right? because it's like it's requires all of these before assumptions that we do. first, it requires that everyone with nuclear weapons forever is always rational and always takes by division. but it also requires a certain level of irrationality because when would it be, when would it be rational to start nuclear war and nuclear war,

a full scale war could and might be, as we know, i mean there will be survivors, but the world that we know what that will be gone? would it ever be rational to do that? i mean the collective suicide would a person like bite and ever feel like that's the right decision to make? probably not, so you would have in order to test to even work, you have to be irrational. and then you have this idea that the opponent would also make divide assumption about 2 bases. would it be irrational too about obviously defending nuclear war here, but would it be irrational to large a nuclear weapon if the other side didn't have one? well that i mean, if you want to mass motor low civilians like sure. and i think that that's also where this, this theory kind of fails. and we see it now is happening in ukraine food and isn't using his nuclear arsenal to protect russia. he's using it to be able to invade a country without nuclear weapons and saying if anyone tries to help, if anyone tries to interfere with my invasion, i will use nuclear weapons. so basically,

and countryside united states are limited in this option where they can do to, to help craniums because it has nuclear weapons. so here is actually a disadvantage. and when you're having this kind of standoff between 22 nuclear on states, for example, like put in and by then who would be the most reckless, like would, would biden ever convincingly threatened to murder more civilians than could it would, would we believe that we put in believe that, and can we guarantee with all of our, like all the countries in the world rely on someone i put in accumulation or she or whoever, to always get it right to never cross that line, but still, in order for it has to work you have to be prepared to cross that line. so it's a complete contradiction noted a terrence and they can never guarantee that they won't, it won't happen. so in this all these kind of weird assumptions and that we're making and at the end of the day, mistakes happen, and people act irrationally. people act unpredictably and we can't guarantee that

it won't happen. and i think that the consequences are so massive that we just have to eliminate them. is that before you go there, many of us who are persuaded by your argument for in nuclear disarmament. but some people would say that, given the history of settler colonialism, imperialism mass, genocide, et cetera, that we have no reason to believe that powerful people, powerful nations, whatever, i concede their weaponry, their nuclear arsenals in particular. and that while the idea is good, will never get there what gives you a hope that we can actually have a world without nuclear weapons. what gives me hope is really that we have made a lot of progress internationally in the world when it comes to international law. when it comes to human rights when it comes to rules and how we supposed to behave . and it doesn't feel like that in particular, not when you open your twitter account, you get overwhelmed with all the awful things that are happening right now. but you

know, things like you and charter as things like that, you know, the geneva conventions be so you know, not just been off the floor. that's awesome. preventing russia from doing all these things right now. but we are opposing the invasion because they're bul saying that you can read and country and without filters. if we never developed the tools, it would just fair game for everyone to just do whatever. and the biggest countries would, would, would win all those things. and they would do whatever they want, but they can't be me, always do whatever they want. and i think the things like the colonization, for example, seeing how all these countries who were colonized by the, by the struggles, major powerful countries have become free today. and all their own countries, and that's, you know, they did that despite these countries having weapons, i think that is a way and the powerful have always lost their power when the majority has risen up and stood against that. that that's when you can really make change happen. so the,

treating prohibition on the us is really all way of creating a high pollution on, in the nuclear structure that we created like no longer can these 5 countries and the other 4 that has them as well, like just dictate the terms and said this is fine, because we have them and you can't have them now where we're changing the game. we're creating new laws and new rules and we're going to demand a different system based man. thank you so much for joining me on upfront the our killer robots, the future of war, more technically known as legal, autonomous weapon systems or laws. these robots can operate independently and attack targets without human control. artificial intelligence weapons have already been deployed and military conflict, but some warn the war and ukraine could see both sides using autonomous weapons in an unprecedented way. despite you and lead attempts to curb development and established international regulation of laws. countries including the u. s. and russia are continuing their uncheck development of the technology. human rights

organizations are campaigning against killer robots. while some military experts argue that they'll make more safer and more efficient. are they right? and are we witnessing the dawn of a new arms race? joining me to discuss this, our, lar nolan, a former google employee in software engineer with the international committee for robot, arms control and matt, matt moody and artificial intelligence researcher with amnesty international. good to see both of you. thank you for joining me. a lore i'm going to start with you. the evolution of killer robots has been described as a, quote, potentially seismic event in warfare akin to the invention of gun powder and nuclear bombs. that's a rather, a staggering characterization is the one you'd agree with it. absolutely. if not, i mean the intention of gunpowder is something that is actually pretty much forums that the whole, the whole nature of that they should state the whole way that we live. i don't think that, hey, on weapons are likely to be that seismic. i mean,

i think looking at the current context, we live in it. we're living in the world where people are building isn't complex weapons which are unproven, and their, their utility and their efficacy is completely on proven. i do think that on those weapons are likely to pose danger both to yeah and, but soldiers themselves. i think there's a very high risk of friendly fire incidents. i think there's a high risk of civilian harm. i think there's a very high risk of potentially sparking off the conflict in an unintentional kind of way. man, i want to give it to you for a 2nd. in terms of the technology of war, are we now going to see a race to who can to see who can build the, the biggest and most efficient and more just most destructive killer robot? i do think it's important to note that states are course in competition with each other around systems. i mean in january 2021 along we've seen any vision, raphael baset their past systems building and showcasing commercial jones and robot dog capable official recognition. we've seen in libby on march 2020 the use of

various cargo drawings, which has been developed by turkey mc number of cases in which technologies that are atomic weapon system by definition are being used. however, we said the form of the art arms race might look quite different to what we're expecting. a lot of the technologies that autonomy, about the systems are built on our technologies that are being used in everyday context. in the leasing context. for example, facial recognition for math surveillance, emotion recognition, gate recognition, predictive analytics. these are all tools that we know are being used against, for example, life matter for testers, and have been known to time and time again fail. and to augment racially discriminatory policing. and our defacto against international human rights law. so if we're looking for that one terminator to show up at our door, we're maybe looking in the wrong place. and that argue that what we're actually needing to, to keep an eye out,

or are these more on sort of the ways in which these technologies are starting to play a role in our everyday lives and govern how we live. and it seems to me that a big part of that is the growing partnerships between these tech companies and governments. laura, you worked as an engineer for google before residing in 2018 out of protest after you were assigned to work on project maven, which seeks to advanced drone technology for the u. s. military. in recent years, amazon, microsoft and google have us on contracts with the pentagon, while others, including elan, must have pledge not to develop lethal autonomous weapons. how dangerous are these partnerships? particularly in light of the fact that these companies have the personal information of more than a 1000000000 people around the world. i think i don't like to underline what not just said, which is that. and these are not only military technologies. and there are huge

implications here for civil liberties for privacy and for you know, how, how we live our lives. i've cyber warfare context as well. so fundamentally, when you're talking about autonomous weapons, if you want to blow up a bridge, you don't really need not on this weapon out. almost weapons are fundamentally about targets that are mobile and not, not for talking. military base is an offer, tracking time columns there about people there about people and vehicles that have people in them. and therefore it, these kinds of weapons are very intimately backed up in surveillance technologies because you need to have a lot on the weapon. you need to have a technology to know where people are, where people are moving around to understand their behavior. and so we're big tech comes into this is if you think about cloud computing technology, you have a companies like amazon, microsoft, google, they're making a lot of money out of selling commodity cloud computing technology. now surveillance technology is hugely compute intensive. so quite simply, it takes

a lot of c p u cycles, a lot of memory, a lot of expensive competing and infrastructure to run this kind of technology. so there's a huge business opportunity here to build surveillance systems. and i think we can see that more and out in the fact that all of the major credit companies have built a p eyes for recognizing objects for recognizing people. and this is them, as i say, this is very much dual use technology between military and civilian applications. man, let me ask you a question about precision here. us air strikes are notoriously imprecise. they've killed thousands of civilians. for example, there was a gross reagan rural yemen in 2013 that killed at least a dozen people at a wedding procession all civilians. according to human rights groups, a 2016 us air strike in northern syria killed at least 120 civilians could a our technology, at least reduce deadly incidents like this. absolutely not. humans are not just numbers and i think the systems do process human beings as if they were,

we know from research that joy well, and we intend to get routed a while ago. that in many cases, facial recognition systems are incapable of identifying especially black women with a rate of anywhere between $60.00 to $70.00, to sometimes 90 percent, depending on the study that you look at. now even if you were to make those systems 99 percent accurate, let's say that you could, you're still dealing with systems that are inherently existing in the context of discrimination, institutional racism, massage any etc. and so i think it's important that we learn how would that be different than the current systems of policing or surveillance, or education or anything else we have. so it would double down in a meant those existing crises and also existing forms of discrimination. so we don't want to have a system in which say you have these discriminatory practices and put them on steroids. that's exactly the opposite of what we want to do. and so what we need is

in fact a legally binding instrument, which is what the stock killer robot campaign is calling or, and what we need is also a global ban on remote biometric surveillance technologies. which figure in to these autonomous weapon systems. i did want to make a quick gun point regarding what matt said before that and about the dangers of back accountability regulation and why it makes a difference that we might take an imperfect process that is executed by human beings on automated. so one of the great problems that we have, and i guess with both preserving our civil rights in a free society and also with overseeing and national humanitarian law and ensuring that the, the international both warfare our respect to is. but we have a lack of transparency. and one of the things that we see is when we automate a process, we as much as we make it less flexible. and we also tend to make it much less transparent. if we start taking the logic of what we're doing in warfare or am in

our society, i'm starting coaching it in, in, in processing algorithms and processes that are very inscrutable that can be inspected by few people. and that are controlled by a few people. then we, we do, we do risk things spinning out of control and ways that we do not want laura, there's also an argument to be made that it's too late, right? the most powerful nations are supporting this stuff. the technologies are already in use u. s. national security commission co chair, robert work said a, a i in warfare is already happening. so if it's already happening and again, the most powerful people are behind it. what do we do isn't too late. i think that that is a very, very yeah, net listed kind of approach to, to take to us look at nuclear weapons. they were used in 1945 and they haven't been used since. so it's possible to refrain from the use of weapons as regard

development. there's also been very, very strong norm has emerged against chemical weapons. and also, biological weapons, of course, does a very, very strong emerging norm against the use of landmines because of the, the hard but they do civilians. so i think it's, i don't think it's correct to say that there's no hope. the weapons never beat up weapons are never bound or the state never refrained from using particular types of buttons that it's never to. but we have to talk human beings and not data points that had up the agenda and hadn't seen climate time again, with even issues of check. as soon as enough people are aware of the kind of harm the systems are causing, they will inevitably move the needle on what is seen as permissible. and what we need to do in this particular moment is move the needle on how permissible we are finding thomas weapons system. and you know, from where we're standing. absolutely acceptable. laura met,

thank you so much for joining me on upfront. all right, that is our show upfront. we'll be back next week the ah a, which is ever fine reporting an in depth analysis. we bring the latest on the ukraine war on the unfolding humanitarian crisis. documentary that he spied whitney springs world issues into focus through compelling human stories almost 6 decades

after fidel castro's proclamation of the communist republic of cuba, we explore the issues shaping the countries future. al jazeera investigative program full flying for time with a special theories on abuse in the boy scouts of america. lebanon goes to the polls, but will political change help the country find its way out of its cripple. economic crisis may on al jazeera when the war on ukraine commenced. people in power reached out to inhabitants over arguments. the nations 2nd city, less than 40 miles from the russian border. as the carnage on falls, a handful of civilians document their experiences as they tried to survive and maintain some normality in a reality. turned upside down. a rare glimpse at life under the bonds ukraine. a city under siege on it just either. we understand the differences and similarities of cultures across the wound. so no matter where you call hand

out, you sarah, will bring you the news and current affairs that mattie out of there ah, ah, victory for mineral natural makes him the 1st french president to be re elected in 20 years at his promising change. while his defeated far right campaigner challenger back marine, the pen says she'll carry on and focus on moving parliamentary elections ah a life more headquarters here are coming up in the next 30 minutes.