If the key failure in the construction of the androids from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is that they are unable to feel empathy, I suppose that empathy is then integral to what it means to be human. If androids are engineered to be better than humans, is empathy then a hindrance to humans? Would a society of humans without empathy be better?

In Germany in the 1880s the idea of "in-feeling" was presented to describe the idea of the emotional appreciation of another's feelings. But there's a difference between appreciating that someone is going through a hard time and actually feeling for them or with them. I don't even know how many times I have heard the phrase "try to put yourself in his shoes," when discussing the questionable nature of someone else's decisions.  This attempt to mirror the emotional experience of someone else is empathy; it allows us to understand the experiences of others without actually going through it. Understanding the emotional experience allows us to forgive when we cannot understand solely by reason.

Sometimes empathy even goes against what we would conclude logically. There are times where we see someone cause pain or commit great crimes, but for some reason we feel bad for them. I know I have had instances where hearing about the background of a young person who committed a horrible crime prevented me from being able to be as angry as I think I should be. If our emotions are our bodies' response to experiences and our thoughts are the conscious, analytical response to the same experience, we understand what we go through. When hearing about someone else's life or witnessing a situation where someone feels a great emotion, we can understand as outsiders because of the progression of events and reasoning. But if emotions are in part a physiological response to being in a situation, then we are lacking in understanding others. Empathy allows us to connect experience and thought, enabling us to feel as though we were in the other person's shoes.

Empathy is what allows us to build relationships, form communities, where all are protective of each other because they understand each other's situations. I say society would not exist the way it does today without empathy. If we were not empathetic, each individual would fight for his own good, tearing down others. There would be no collaboration, no sharing, no forgiving.

In creating better humans, be it androids or posthumans, one of the main focuses is intelligence. Aiming for goals of faster computing, problem solving techniques, being able to observe patterns, etc. But empathy is very primal, requiring little intelligence to be experienced. I think it's interesting that one of the more fundamental, basic ideas of humanity is what gets lost in the translation to artificial intelligence. Maybe because humans build up their memories and emotional experiences as they go, recalling them to relate to other beings. Even if an android could recognize a sad situation, and has seen them before, remembering "being sad" would only bring up the same program, the same sequence. The individual experiences are what cannot be programmed into androids.

An android society might be more productive at first, but I do not think it would be self-sustaining.