Oh sorry about that. Uh, it’s not required for tool use, or even space flight. But it’s one of the main paths I know of to fulfill a need, specifically having a society at all. You see, you need a dynamic society to do, well, most stuff, try developing technology when you make a tool and you’re solitary so it’s quickly forgotten after your death. You might think this can be done without empathy, but I just don’t see it. The thing is society isn’t a thing that happens, and it’s good if empathy cause then less people die, it’s a thing that people make. why would people make a society? if it betters them? it doesnt. It takes millennia to get returns from society, while in the short term you pay taxes, get oppressed, do wars, ect. Society is based on mutual agreement and cooperation, even if you think society is imposed from without I’d say that empathy is still necessary. One of the main tools used by authoritarians, as well as literally everyone has ever tried to convince anyone to agree with them on anything, is a story to hold in common. Be it Zeus the almighty, Abrahamic God the almightier, the founding fathers the freedom-loving, the proletariat that’ll inevitably take over and instituting marxism, or even vaguer ideas, like the idea that humans are unique among the beasts, or that people deserve what they get. Ideas like this are based on understanding the characters or stand-ins in a story as people, a basically empathetic skill. These stories are what separate a nation from a state, but beyond that they prevent a state from falling apart as the bureaucrats holding it together dont have a stable currency (the dollar is a story, as is the euro, and capitalism, and socialism for that matter), the army from taking over (a command structure could be held together via lower mammalian level social functions, which are only basic level empathy, but without a believable story only a wolf pack worth of people could be loyal and not totally anarchist), and so many other things are based on stories.
I think there are alternatives to empathy. Hive minds come to mind, as do single, immortal entities like a mind controlling fungus that splits off drones to take over animals and gather resources, recruit, and get info until it dies and its brain shroom forms a mycelial connection with the main body to add the information to the store. Tons of cool ways to not use empathy but SAWK (me talking out of my Belgium, it stands for Society as we known it) is reliant on empathy.