hard enough, dense enough and round enough for long enough that it ignited a clean energy source that could revolutionize the world. ah, ah, with ah title creature got the headlines here on al jazeera, the world health organization has met chinese officials to request more information on the country surgeon cove. at 19 cases, the w. h o r,

for sharing of real time data and offered practical support, follows growing doubts about the transparency of official chinese figures. but you can france have joined a growing list of countries to impose cobit 19 checks on arrivals from china. the us, japan, indian italy, i've already announced compulsory testing. china has denounced the new rules as discriminatory or can't 80 all countries score 19. prevention and control measures should be scientific and appropriate and should not affect the normal people to people contact as well as normal exchange and cooperation in recent days, many leading medical experts for multiple countries have said that there is no need to impose restrictions on entry of travelers from china, us house democrats, several is 6 years of donald trump's tax returns. the congressional committee says the records show he paid no income tax in 20. 20 is last full year. as president. trump says, the disclosure will only deepen the country's political divide. although these tax

returns contain relatively little information and not information that almost anybody would understand their extremely complex, the radical democrat behavior is a shame upon the u. s. congress, kosovo as open to northern border crossings with serbia. they were blocked for 3 weeks after casa and serb set up barricades in protest against the arrest of a former sir policeman. venezuelan, the opposition parties are voted to dissolve the interim government led by one guy don't. it was formed after president nicholas maderos widely disputed victory in the 2018 elections. ukraine says it's destroyed 16 iranian made drones launched by russia towards keith. early on friday, the attack came a day after moscow carried out one of its biggest missile strikes as the war began in february. and brazil is observing 3 days of morning after the death of football legend play. he died on thursday at the age of $82.00 is the only man to lift the football woke up 3 times. so those are the headlines. the news continues here now

to 0 after upfront statement than to watch vacaville. as 2022 jewels to replace. we reflect on the major stories that shatelle join now to 0 for a series of in depth reports. looking back at this year and to head to 2022 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? or can 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 was headliner, beatrice fit executive director of the 2017 nobel peace prize recipients the international campaign to abolish nuclear weapons. ah, beatrice fin, 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 on states and the other countries that are participating in exercising and practicing and hosting new columbus 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 it's kind of arms face that is happening right now. and of course now we see how russia and 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 pushed 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 the 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 leave 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 paint 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 wouldn't happen between say, a us base and russia person, i mean the consequent that could be up to the pedestal that we could stumble into nuclear war. and of course, we see the situations like north korea testing this also to be again, south korea, saying that it was nuclear weapons. we've seen bella rues 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 an us. there is so many variables

here and so many uncertainty, tuition, and we're just being 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 i 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 this moved by the us under my 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 this man thing of international legal

instruments. we've seen violation of international instrument not on one side, but from many different sides. we saw trump withdraw from the i n f treaty from the ran via which the russia violates a lot of these kind of instruments. we've seen them barley, the chemical weapons convention as well. we have seen a really negative turn and then you add this very kind of trend of nationalistic sort of might 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 arsenal, 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 situations like, do they just decide over the fate of my country to do? we have a say in this, and that's exactly what the treated, 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. i was really a huge diplomatic achievement to get it. so when it was spoken, 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,

but 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 obese 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, full scale,

if the war could end jermanti as we know what i mean, there will be survivors. but like the world that we know it would be gone. would it ever be rational to do that? i mean that's collected suicide. would a person like bite and ever feel like that's the right decision to make? probably not, so you would have to in order for the chance to even work, you have to be irrational. and then you have this idea that the opponent would also make the by to some soon, about 2 bases. would it be irrational too about obviously defending nuclear war here, but would it be irrational to launch a nuclear weapon if the other side didn't have one? well then, 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 an option where they can do to, to help the cranium because it has nuclear weapons. so here is actually a disadvantage. and when you're having this kind of stand up between 22 nuclear arms states, for example, i put in and by done, who would be the most reckless like would, would biden ever convincingly threatened to murder more civilians than put 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, was she or whoever, to always get it right to never cross that line. but still, in order for the test 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 a nuclear disarmament. but some people would say that, given the history of settler colonialism, imperialism, ah, mass genocide, et cetera, that we have no reason to believe that powerful people, powerful nations, whatever, ah, 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. guess me hope is really that we have made a lot of progress in the nationally in the world when it comes to international law . when it comes to human rights. when it comes to rules on how it's 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 the un charter and things like that. you know, the geneva conventions be so you know, not just, they don't flaw less ass in preventing russia from doing all these things right now . but we are opposing the invasion because there are rules saying that you can read in a country. and without those who us, if we never developed those rules, it will just fair game for everyone to just to whatever. and the biggest countries would, would, would win all those things and they would do whatever they want. but they can't really, always do whatever they want. and i think the things like the colonization for simple seeing how all these countries who were colonized by the, by be settled, 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 away 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, the prohibition. nicholas is really all way of creating a revolution on,

in this 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 say, this is fine because we have them and you can't have them now where we're changing the game. we create a new last a new rules and we're going to demand a different system. better spend, thank you so much for joining me on up front. ah, our killer robots, the future war, more technically known as leaf autonomous weapons systems or laws. these robots can operate independently and attack targets without human control. artificial intelligence weapons already been deployed in military conflict, but some war and the war and ukraine could see both sides using autonomous weapons in an unprecedented way. despite human lead attempts to curb development and established international regulation of loss, countries including the u. s. and russia are continuing their unchecked 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 and software engineer with the international committee for robot, arms control and matt, math, moody, an artificial intelligence researcher with amnesty international. good to see both of you. thank you for joining me. a laura, 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 staggering characterization. is it when you'd agree with it? absolutely. if not, i mean the invention of gunpowder is something that is actually pretty much formed . the whole, the whole make sure that they state the whole way that we live. i don't think the weapons are likely to be thought seismic. i mean,

i think looking at the current context, we live, we're living in a world where people are building is complex weapons which are unproven. their, their utility and their efficacy is completely unproven. i do think that on the weapons are likely to post danger both to both the soldiers themselves. i think there's a very, 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 and on an intentional kind of way met. 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 biggest and most efficient and most destructive killer robot? i do think it's important to note that states are, of course, in competition with each other around a thomas weapon 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 libya and 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 autonomous systems are built on our technologies that are being used in everyday context. in the leasing context, for example, facial recognition for mass 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 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 or 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 would like to underline what might 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'd sideboard 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 harmless weapon. almost weapons are fundamentally about targets that are mobile and they're not, not protecting military bases and offer, talking to columns, thereby people there about people and vehicles that have people in them. and therefore, in these kinds of weapons, they're very intimately banked in surveillance technologies because you need to, to have a weapon. you need to have a technology to know where people are, where people are moving around, inch to understand their behavior. where 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 computing and infrastructure to run this kind of technology. so there is a huge business opportunity here to build surveillance systems. and i think we can see that for and out in the fact that all of the major cloud companies have built an api for recognizing objects for recognizing people. this is, as i say, this is very much, do you use technology between military and civilian applications? man, let me ask you a question about precision here. u. s. air strikes are notoriously imprecise. they've killed thousands of civilians. for example, there was a jose 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 u. s. 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 will 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're looking 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, isadine, et cetera. 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 my 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 of calling or, and what we need is also a global ban on remote biometric surveillance technologies which you're 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 and 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 instructional humanitarian law and ensuring that the, the international, both of warfare, our respect to is that we have a lack of transparency and one of the things that we see is when we also made 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 i mean

our society, i'm starting coaching it in, in, in process 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, rapid 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? is it too late? i think that that is a very, very at nationalistic kind of approach to, to take too much. okay. look at nuclear weapons. they were used in 1945 and they hadn't been you since. so it's possible to refrain from the use of certain weapons

as regards development. and there is also been very, very strong. norm has emerged against chemical weapons and also biological weapons . and of course, there's a very, very strong emerging norm against the use of landlines because of the, the hard that they do to civilians. so i think it's, i don't, i don't think it's correct to say that there's no hope that the weapons never beat that weapons are never ban door. those days, never refrain from using particular types of weapons met. it's never too late, but we have to put human beings and not data points ahead of the agenda. anatomy seems higher time again. even issues of check. as soon as enough people are aware of the kinds of harms the systems are causing, they will inevitably move the needle on what is permissible. and what we needs to do in this particular moment is move the needle on how permissible we're finding thomas weapon systems. and you know, from where we're standing, it's absolutely acceptable. laura met, thank you so much for joining me on up front. all right,

that is our show up front. we'll be back next week. ah. we've been a hands on journalist working in asia and africa. there'd be days where i'd be choosing and editing my own stories in a refugee camp with no electricity. and right now we're confronting some of the greatest challenges that humanity has ever faced. and i really believe that the only way we can do that is with compassion and generosity and compromise. because that's the only way we can try to solve any of these problem is together. that's why they are so important. we make those connections from inside the walls of a west african prison comes a chance to create, to express that emotion. and take the 1st steps towards rehabilitation. renown

choreographer shares his passion from dance, inspiring prisoners to perform and to reach beyond the ill deeds of their pass on the confines of that pressed the dance. a thieves, a weakness documentary on al jazeera. it's one of the most spectacular mass migrations in the animal kingdom. monarch butterflies, millions of arriving at the winter habitat in central mexico. this year, the international union for the conservation of nature officially designated the migrating monarch butterfly as endangered experts say the use of pesticides along with the laws. habitat are the biggest threats to the species. they may be difficult to see from a distance, but these trees behind us are absolutely covered in monarch butterflies. now tourists are welcome at this protected butterfly sanctuary here in central mexico. but visitors are asked to keep their voices down so as to not disturb the butterflies. for many the up close encounter with millions of these vibrant

butterflies is a once in a lifetime experience. experts in mexico say that despite the monarch being designated as endangered, there's evidence that conservation efforts are working. but ultimately the future of this iconic insect depends on the continued protection of their natural habitat . ah . the wells health organization i just, beijing to share more information on its coven 19 such as more countries, impose checks on travelers from china. ah and i.