Response to Sloman's Review of Affective Computing

Sloman was one of the first in the AI community to write about the role of emotion in computing (Sloman and Croucher 1981), and I value his insight into theories of emotional and intelligent systems. Alas, Sloman's review dwells largely on some details related to unknown features of human emotion; hence, I don't think the review captures the flavor of the book. However, he does raise interesting points, as well as potential misunderstandings, both of which I am grateful for the opportunity to comment on. Sloman writes that I "welcome emotion detectors in a wide range of contexts and relationships, for example, teacher and pupil." This might sound innocuous, but its presumption of the existence of emotion detectors is not.