I agree! I am more worried for students. I guess I should have said: the fear is AI will absorb anyone who *could learn* what a function application is

I think the fear might be that formal semantics will disappear because AI will absorb everyone who knows what a function application is

Sadly, as a field it's just slightly too close to the star of AI research. Whether it will orbit or fall and crash is unclear (a lot of pessimism around though afaict).

Personally in teaching it I think we should emphasise more: (1) How strangely language behaves even in apparently simple domains like Boolean connectives (2) events events events!

So I think that, much like logic, TCS lives a split but stable existence between a topic students learn to make their thinking about language a bit more precise, and a research field that connects more and more with other fields (typology, cognitive science)

The field has matured so that the intro course (usually H&K, using S at the top) is quite far removed from the standard picture in the research lit (some kind of neo-Davidsonian event semantics w/ a rich verbal spine), though there's some attempts to realign (Coppock & Champollion textbook)

(1) a tool to state typological generalisations or describe underdocumented langs, (2) a framework to formulate precise empirical predictions to test (Jacopo Romoli has great stuff here), (3) a way to study how certain kind of meanings are realized and dealt with (e.g. degrees), ...

In my experience most people aren't as committed to (/interested in?) the big foundations that motivated it in the old days (I think Davidson (?) somewhere sums it up as: a systematic account of compositionality+entailment patterns+logical form), and instead use TCS in more applied ways e.g., as:

Yeah, I am in the process of metabolizing that particular shock...

If I think of the time I squandered, Battiato comes to mind:

"Se penso a come ho speso male il mio tempo
Che non tornerà, non ritornerà più"

which could in all purity make beauty perceptible to the senses. Rather was it conveyed and shaped by the somehow awakened voluptuousness of matter, of the organic, dying-living substance itself, the reeking flesh.

and which became form, beauty, a lofty image, and yet all the time the essence of sensuality and desire. For this form and beauty were not spiritborne; nor, like the form and beauty of sculpture, conveyed by a neutral and spiritconsumed substance,

It was a pullulation, an unfolding, a form-building (made possible by the overbalancing of its instability, yet controlled by the laws of growth inherent within it), of something brewed out of water, albumen, salt and fats, which was called flesh,

It was a secret and ardent stirring in the frozen chastity of the universal; it was a stolen and voluptuous impurity of sucking and secreting; an exhalation of carbonic acid gas and material impurities of mysterious origin and composition.

a phenomenon conveyed by matter, like the rainbow on the waterfall, and like the flame. Yet why not material—it was sentient to the point of desire and disgust, the shamelessness of matter become sensible of itself, the incontinent form of being.

It was the existence of the actually impossible-to-exist, of a half-sweet, half-painful balancing, or scarcely balancing, in this restricted and feverish process of decay and renewal, upon the point of existence. It was not matter and it was not spirit, but something between the two,

What then was life? It was warmth, the warmth generated by a form-preserving instability, a fever of matter, which accompanied the process of ceaseless decay and repair of albumen molecules that were too impossibly complicated, too impossibly ingenious in structure.