announcer: hi there. i'm kristin z. you're watching getting answers on abc seven every day, we talked with experts about issues important to the bay area, and we get answers for you in real time today as a i takes over the world is it also poised to cause a mass extinction of languages and ways of thinking will explore this question with the northwestern psychology professor. and author of the power of language. also today is 4 20, but one place where cannabis use is not celebrated in san francisco is the sunset district where neighbors are on the losing end of a battle over dispensary opening our media partner, the san francisco standard looks at the complicated relationship between the chinese american community and marijuana. but first there

is no shovel in the ground yet in las vegas, but it certainly looks like oakland's hopes for reaching a deal with the aids to keep the team in town with a new ballpark have reached a bitter end. when was the moment that i noticed? that this was that the aids were just using the city of oakland to leverage six p.m. last night when i received a phone call from david campbell. that is when. not a happy camper joining us is filled to break it all down. how is it going? >> it has been interesting a couple of days for the city of oakland, oakland a's fans in las vegas, which appears the shovels aren't in the ground but the a's appear to have gotten the ground in las vegas off the strip for a 45,000 seat stadium. that was something that had been talked about for a long time going up in oakland and it never

has, now it looks like chances are it will be someplace else. kristin: who gets the blame here? is their share of blame, fill? -- phil? >> absolutely. this goes back to jerry brown when he was mayor of oakland. i remember there was a big push to build the ballpark in downtown what they were then calling uptown oakland. he said either that or 10,000 units of housing. he went for the housing and i asked him why and he said because all the talk that supported the a's, a ballpark will never happen. that was mayor after mayor after mayor there have been plans, proposed moves to fremont, to san jose, different locations in the city of oakland, and each one has fallen through. at the end of it, people start pointing blame at each other. the fact that the mayor says she was caught off guard, i don't

see how, you and i have been talking for months about the possibility of them moving to las vegas and of them looking for land. the second part of it is the idea that the a's using it for leverage, i don't think so, you don't call somebody up and say, we've got a deal that's got the backing of the governor and other people in nevada, you don't use that as leverage. the a's have long time said they went on a parallel path and they said they have been zeroed in on las vegas because oakland can't seem to get it done and that's what they did, they are making the move to las vegas, whether they actually build their remains to be seen, we've been here before, but that's where it stands. kristin: the a's issued a statement indicating that they were sincere. bottom line, i will read it really quickly, we have made a strong and sincere effort to stay here, we recognize it's hard to hear, we are disappointed that we have been unable to achieve our shared vision of a waterfront ballpark, i want to ask you, no waterfront

ballpark, how devastating is that to the city of oakland with all of its troubles and all of its need to draw people downtown, clean up the cycle, get revenue, get housing, tax dollars, all that? >> on one hand you are building a new ballpark and as we see on the screen and the hotel and apartment buildings and such like that, it would've been a tremendous boom not only for oakland, but for the entire east bay. not to mention the years and thousands of jobs, the multi $12 billion project it would've created. the flipside of that is it would've taken hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money, whether federal, state or local in order to put the infrastructure in for what you are seeing here on the screen. and that would've cost oakland at a time when it's looking at a $200 million deficit over the next couple of years. so one of those things is like,

we won't get the job, we won't get the biggest building project the west coast has seen in decades, on the other hand, oakland will be on the hook like it was with the raiders for hundreds of millions of dollars that later, possibly if it didn't work out, could be on the hook for. >> in terms of the politics and the idea of whether people feel billionaire shouldn't be subsidized with taxpayer dollars, did this outgoing mayor -- is that when the time kind of ran out on all of this? >> the time ran out when a couple of things happen, interest rates have changed, the economy has changed, is not a time to build hotels and office buildings. in las vegas they will bill a stadium. it's a one million deal as opposed to a 12 million deal. they slowly -- the air slowly went out of the tires. the a's wanted to go to peralta college. the city in college said no, they said, try howard terminal, the reluctantly went down there,

they spent millions of dollars studying that. after they work to deal out with the city as far as with the oakland mayor, they presented to the city council, and this mayor and her public counsel people said, no, we want to redo it, so they redid it in a way that would make the a's happy, and they have been -- they've had a week or so of really close negotiations, a couple of weeks recently in the mayor was thinking they would work something out, but that wasn't the case. and everybody's got a piece of skin in the game and everybody has a share of the blame. >> i think you mention laney college in oakland is where they have their eyes on and they dance with them for a little bit, there were so many potential places, the how do you think this will reflect on the new mayor? >> that will be some people that agree, like you said, we should have finance millionaire ballparks and that makes sense because it's a is in this decision, the oakland team is

worth the money and will be a lot more if that stadium will be built. there's something to be said for that. on the other hand, she will see the last professional -- big-time professional sports team exit. it's kind of interesting, i have to tell you, this has been a grenade or hot potato since jerry brown, every mayor has worked to try to keep the sports team in oakland but not commit a lot of money to do it, we saw it with the oakland raiders saying no to them finally, and then moving on to las vegas, now this from the mayor, a lot o this happened under her watch, but the mayor will be the one mayor who may be lost the a's, and that's one of the reason she's hitting back at the a's saying they weren't doing this in good faith because she starting to get ahead of what is

likely to be criticism. oakland has a lot of other things to worry about, some other people say, let's concentrate on that rather than building something we don't necessarily need, which is a big ballpark. kristen: during the chat groups there were community groups in the a's had to battle a lot of those in court. i wonder if their experience will deter others from coming into develop, whether it's a ballpark or something else. >> es, oakland is a very difficult place to get anything built. a lot of times you think you have something going and you never know when a community group will walk in and say, no, we want more, that has been the sad story many times of oakland they have lost things, but remember, they still have that 125 acre complex called the oakland coliseum that we are showing right there on the screen. this massive, massive outdoor arena that is sitting there, could be sitting there empty

after 2024. so they will have another chance to try to bring something in. this deal might have been too big for a city that in many ways has been shrinking in recent years. economically and in terms of self image. it's more of a bedroom community than a manufacturing hub and corporate center. maybe this is just the evolution. you can go to las vegas.

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kristin: we've seen artificial intelligence take off with chat gpt and it could lead to some of the languages going extinct. someone who is researching that very question is the book the power of language, how the codes we use to make, speak and live transform our minds. its author and northwestern university psychology professor is here with us today.

thank you so much, professor, for joining us. >> i'm pleased to be here. kristen: there is so much celebration of ai, many applications, but you are concerned about its potential impact on languages. >> that's right. for the world's languages, the most likely consequence of increased reliance on large language models is a decrease in linguistic diversity and an acceleration in the rate at which the world's languages will disappear. to understand why this scenario is the most likely one, it is understood -- it is important to understand that large language models like chat gpt needs to be trained on anonymous amounts of data, the more data they are trained on, the better, the key point here, however, is that the size available to train large language models varies across

languages, there are over 7000 languages used in the world today, the less spoken languages have smaller corpora available for training language models. by most or so have large enough digital databases to have high resour languages. most of the other languages in the world are relatively lower digital resources to be trained on. so over time, in the ai race, the large resource languages will become more powerful and become the dominant languages while the others will gradually disappear. kristen: explain to me why -- get that, english is all over the place, so that is the data is trained on, so it spits out in english and processes in english, so how does that make for the hawaiian native language disappear question mark is still there just doesn't show up in chat she bt, right?

but except a good question. this is not just about wet ai can do, but also about what the human mind will do, what we as people will choose to do, and we tend to want to use the best, the most powerful, the most optimal system. so even though ai will have access to hawaiian, most people will choose to use the english version. so the choices that we will make over time as a group will increase our reliance on this stronger, most developed languages. >> you talk about extinction rate, you said we have 7000 languages now, how many have disappeared and what is the rate of disappearance? >> there are a little over 7000 languages in the world today, it is estimated that about nine languages disappear every year,

so roughly one every four days because of globalization, because of various other issues. hawaiian is a unclaimed language already, but what large language models will do is further accelerate this rate. kristin: when we lose the language, for people who say, what's the big deal, so you use other words and speak another language, that you are saying it's not just the spoken word, it's tied into how we think, respond, act, choose, how? >> my area of research is the -- is a relationship of language. the reality is that this relationship is bidirectional, we know that our brains learn and use language, but at the same time, in turn, our languages influence our brains and shape our minds.

so the many different languages of the world are a source of diversity of thought. language and culture are intertwined, so this cultural linguistic diversity provides diversity of perspectives that is beneficial for problem-solving solving, creativity, for decision-making, any person who runs a business knows that a diversity of perspective from approaching ideas is highly desirable and research supports confirms that that it's a desirable thing for progress in discovery. so we don't want just artificial intelligence to become more sophisticated in using increasing diverse symbolic system to have humans go in the other directions and decrease the diversity of symbolic systems that the human mind uses. kristin: in the short 30 seconds, what do you think our solutions? what do we need to do? >> i think keeping as many human languages as possible alive and engaging human minds can

contribute to this diversity of thought and can help buy us time to come up with solutions to allow us to coexist to advance design. our many human languages may be the strongest card we have in the lot -- in the language game we may eventually have to play with ai. it's not about a romantic idea of language and the beauty of language, it's a practical matter, keeping language engaging human mind, artificial languages are both types of symbolic systems and we want the human mind to be engaged in as many and as diverse as possible symbolic systems. kristen: i don't want the human species to get less creative, so -- >> we got wanted to have uniformity of thought. >> professor, thank you so we really appreciate the conversation. >> thank you so much for having me. kristen: up next, a debate over

dispensaries just-in-time for four 20. why some san franciscans are taking a stand against cannabis in their neighborhood and the historical,

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kristin: today is 420 in san francisco and the annual celebratory event is about to begin in golden gate park. this tradition began long before cannabis became legal but it stands in contrast to the feeling of many residents in the city sunset district radar media partner at the san francisco standard has written an article in the wake of the board of supervisors approving a cannabis dispensary against the wishes of a large portion of chinese american residents in that neighborhood. the story explores the complicated reasons why there is stigma against marijuana use in that community. joining us live now is our reporter for the san francisco standard. nice to see you. >> thank you for having me. kristin: tell us about the dispensary that was just

approved. where will it be? >> san francisco sunset district will soon have a new cannabis dispensary. it's located on a team avenue. it's in the inner sunset district. what's more interesting here, it's actually within an italian restaurant. gold mirror is a well-known italian restaurant and they decided to expand their business model to cannabis. kristin: as you mentioned, there were protests, there were a lot of people who showed up at a lot of meetings. many residents opposed and made their feelings known. here's one of the many protests. >> keep the drugs away from children. of cross -- across the street we have preschool, we have students, we have small kids and they should move somewhere else. kristin: she raised a point about preschool at and kids, what does the law say about dispensaries in proximity to

where children congregate? >> one of the major concerns from protesters is are the dispensaries too close to children. san francisco's law prohibits cannabis dispensary to be too close away from school. but the school definition here does not include daycare since -- daycare center. only care center for kids, for the youngest kids. so that makes a lot of parents upset. kristin: there residential neighborhood, sunset is pretty residential, where there are also children where you don't see as much opposition. i would like to explore with you what are some of the reasons that cannabis use may be less accepted in the chinese american community. >> that's a really good question. i have been covering about the anti-cannabis movement in chinese american community for years since its legalization. but this is the first time we

are really trying to figure out what is the cultural history and background behind this anti-cannabis movement. and that's quite complex. it's a lot complicated than we think. actually, cannabis has thousands of years in chinese agriculture and literature. the agriculture part is more for industry years and also china's medicine. also records of using cannabis, but not widely used. so why it's so stigmatized. some events are like the opium wars in chinese government crackdown, and naturally, in chinese language cannabis, drug, opium, they are in negative tones if you speak chinese. [speaking chinese] all of this just makes cannabis stigmatized in chinese culture. kristin: this photo dating back to the 1900s, early on, and of the 1800s you mentioned opium

wars. china lost a lot of power and it got carved up due to the influence of opium that a lot of people got addicted to it. so there has been that stigma against drug use. as you mentioned, you also mentioned the word itself marijuana. i think we have got to show for those interested in language and culture. here's a word for cannabis, it is [speaking chinese], what does that mean? >> literally it means big nam. it can refer to its medical benefits, relieve the pain, but it also sounds very negative in the chinese language. kristin: so there's all that going on, maybe that explains why -- and i think you did a good map in your story showing the city and whether dispensaries are in there is kind of a drought where the chinese american population is greatest. chinatown, certainly a drought

there, and then the sunset. will this be the first one in the sunset? >> actually, the outer has cannabis dispensaries and chinatown there is a total ban of cannabis dispensaries. so there is no cannabis dispensary at all. kristin: i wonder if you observe and attitude changing on marijuana. if there's any generational shifts in attitude. >> there is a very clear generational difference between the older generation. immigrants, american-born chinese americans. we did interview a few chinese american younger generation, they have a more open minded attitude toward cannabis and a lot of them are in the cannabis industry. maybe they are owning a cannabis dispensary or partially owned some of those stores. they also want to help solve this problem with the older generation, parents, grandma, or

make some changes to the fear in the community. kristin: really interesting exploration -- explanation -- exploration of the role of cannabis and how the attitudes have been evolving and shifting, thank you so much, we really appreciate it. >> thank you for having me. kristin: you can check out the story and much more of the san francisco standard's original reporting is all on standard.com. abc 7 will continue to bring you more segments featuring the standard city focus. reminder, you can get our live newscast, breaking news, weather and more with our streaming tv

kristin: thanks for joining us, we will be here every wee ♪ ♪ >> david: tonight, some are breaking stories has become in the air, charges to be dropped against alec baldwin. what we have just learned. also the stunning images from texas tonight, the world's largest rocket blasting off and then exploding. severe storms as we come on the air tonight, tornado watches in several states right now. if several cities including chicago tonight in the zone. first tonight, less than two weeks before trial, prosecutors to drop the involuntary manslaughter charge against alec baldwin for the shooting death of cinematographer halyna hutchins. what's behind the move, late reporting. also tonight, tracking the tornado watch up right now in several cities as i mentioned chicago included. it comes amid