[_Y_]

I'd like slightly disagree. I do think more people needs to be analytical but without empathy and morality all hacker qualities would be rendered meaningless and pointless.

As a hacker without empathic skills I could pick any goal and ruthlessly implement it: Goal: Need more organ donors 1. People are unwilling to donate organs 2. Force all prisoners on death row to give away they organs for staying in death row accommodation 3. Kill them in ways that doesn't hurt the organs (they might suffer some inconvenience) 4. Harvest organs

As Charlie Chaplin in Great Dictator said: "More than machinery we need humanity, more than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness, without these qualities life would be violent and all would be lost."

[tikhonj]

I don't think "empathy" and "morality" are fundamentally required; rather, they are convenient heuristics for interacting with other humans. As long as you are rational, then acting without empathy or morals would still result in similar behavior (depending on how "smart" and well-informed you are, I guess).

A rational agent seeks to maximize utility. It turns out that murdering people for their organs does not maximize utility! At the very least, society is cleverly structured in a way that the probable utility of murdering somebody for their organs is relatively low.

Basically, my point is that your argument is a straw man. The issue isn't too much logic but rather than you (the agent killing everybody in the example) did not use enough of it. For some reason, all the "arguments" about the inferiority of logic always assume the logical person is extremely short-sighted or ill-informed.

[_Y_]

You can call it a heuristic or a guideline, but I consider them essential. Perfectly rational agents without empathy can commits massive acts of evil trying to achieve their goal. Or as the proverb says "Road to hell is paved with good intentions".

And I don't think short-sightedness or ill-informing was ever an integral part with arguing about how empathy is essential to human live. IIRC there was an example of perfectly informed and rational computer of super human intelligence who was told to calculate a particularly difficult equation, to which he promptly restructured all matter on earth, including people into a giant super-computer.

[notahacker]

Societal structure is not a constant. In China, for example, the government willingly admitted that 2/3 of organ donations came from executed prisoners (2009), as proposed by the original argument. A purely rational Chinese person probably wouldn't consider criticising this policy to be a means of maximising his utility, and it's not even easy to make an argument that abolition of that specific practice in isolation would maximise society's utility.