One of my fundamental contentions is that empathy is a requirement for intelligence beyond a certain point because the consequences of lacking it are too severe to overcome.

Now if you had suggested that intelligence cannot evolve beyond a certain point unless accompanied by empathy ... that would be another matter. I could easily be convinced that a social animal requires empathy almost as much as it requires eyesight, and that non-social animals cannot become very intelligent because they would never develop language.

But I see no reason to think that an evolved intelligence would have empathy for entities with whom it had no social interactions during its evolutionary history. And no a priori reason to expect any kind of empathy at all in an engineered intelligence.

Which brings up an interesting thought. Perhaps human-level AI already exists. But we don't realize it because we have no empathy for AIs.