1. Communication capacity is the reason empathic capability is important. Human-human communication relies on perspective-taking and evolves over time as our brains get more exposure to people. Emotional empathic capacity is just the bootstrap for perspective-taking. If human cultural norms evolve for communication capacity, then there is a case that empathic capacity will simply use too much cognitive capacity to fit within these cultural norms.
2. We communicate more and more with non-human devices than humans. I can't even imagine what this looks like 100 yrs from now or 1000, but there is a chance that natural selection will favor brains optimized for communicating with devices and machines where emotional empathy is not present.
Natural selection would only benefit those who are more able to communicate with devices if that trait led them to produce more offspring than the people without it; that's the selection part.
Do you see people who have a more natural ability to work and understand computers as having more kids than the rest of the population? If anything, it's the opposite.
I meant selection criteria in the same sense that ability to succeed in college may be selection criteria today. It does not require birthing more kids, rather a consistent use of this selection criteria from generation to generation in a subset of the population. If machines are performing all the work, and being able to send 10M messages per day to these machines is a requisite for economic success, some parents will filter heavily for this criteria in he best interest of their children.
I would say that we communicate with other humans at least as much today as in the past. We just are spending more and more time using "high-tech" communication mediums that filter a lot of the nuance and nearly all of the non-verbal cues from conversation.
Arguably, the need to pick up on emotions through text- or audio-only communication might make empathy more important.
1. Communication capacity is the reason empathic capability is important. Human-human communication relies on perspective-taking and evolves over time as our brains get more exposure to people. Emotional empathic capacity is just the bootstrap for perspective-taking. If human cultural norms evolve for communication capacity, then there is a case that empathic capacity will simply use too much cognitive capacity to fit within these cultural norms.
2. We communicate more and more with non-human devices than humans. I can't even imagine what this looks like 100 yrs from now or 1000, but there is a chance that natural selection will favor brains optimized for communicating with devices and machines where emotional empathy is not present.