I once was thinking that if intelligent machines surpassed human intelligence, the end game would be human intelligence would atrophy but the machines would continue to serve us.
Then I had a humorous thought - what if this already happened, i.e. cats were superintelligent, invented humans to serve them and then they had no need for their own intelligence.
It's funny to think that no matter how our technology develops, cats will be right there along for the ride, completely ignorant of it all. It's humorously comforting to think of an interstellar civilization powered by fusion and AGI serving cats just as they're served now. Scratching posts on starships seems to be inevitable.
The domestication of cats happened because of the invention of farming.
If you store grain in a granary, it attracts a lot of insects, rodents, etc. Cats that could tolerate getting close to human settlements found a good food source. And humans like this, because the cats protect the grain without eating it. So you can see why ancient agrarian societies like the Egyptians held cats in high esteem.
And despite only having a few thousand years to adapt to each other, ends up cats and humans can understand each other and form emotional bonds pretty easily.
I imagine we'll see cats on spaceships of the future just like they were the norm on ships in the age of sail.
I would recommend the two episodes "Three Robots" and "Three Robots: Exit Strategies" from the anthology series Love, Death and Robots if you like this kind of humor.
In the puzzle game series The Talos Principle, intelligent robots (who were made to outlive humanity after a species-ending global pandemic) seem to have the exact same kind of affinity for caring for cats that humans do. It's actually really sweet and cute.
Basically when the "minds" are benevolent deities all scenarios are possible including this one. We can spend our time with cats, we can even turn into cats...as he writes about "Changers" who genetically alter themselves or shift species at whim.
I used to run a Twitter bot called @itsavailable that would mine interesting strings that were not registered .com domains and tweet them out at a regular cadence. One of its sources was the most-visited English-language Wikipedia page titles in the past hour.
One of the only domains I ever bothered purchasing for myself was https://catgap.com
There are many fascinating things about cats, but one of the things I often think about is how interesting it is that an animal of such solitary nature became domesticated so easily, and how social – and socially intelligent – domestic cats came to be, despite stereotypes. To the point that many housecats, and entire breeds, are called "dog-like" in their demeanor. Female feral cats also form social groups, "colonies", though unfixed males are certainly more territorial. This is evidently an example of neoteny, the retention of juvenile traits in adulthood, seeing that most felids do have a social period while living with their mother and littermates.
Cats are actually very social animals, they just don't firm similar pack structures to dogs
With modem technology it became feasible to observe cats without disruption and it showed communal behaviours, including communal care for offspring and IIRC even bringing food to share.
All along the line of somewhat transitionally joined communities instead of more stable groups
Yes, this is (outdoors, stray, or feral) domestic cats, which is exactly what I mentioned. And as I said, it's largely the females and their juvenile offspring that form colonies – unfixed adult males, while certainly capable of having friendly social encounters on "no cat's lands", definitely don't willingly share their territory with other adult males.
But my point was that their immediate ancestor (and practically still the same species – they easily interbreed) the African wildcat is not similarly gregarious, and neither is almost any other felid, big or small.
Cats have only been domesticated for like ~10k years, so not much in the way of change or adaptation has happened. So wildcats have the same capacity for forming social bands and such, they just don't in the wild as they don't have any incentive to.
Neoteny is easy to achieve in 10k years. Cf. the Soviet experiments on domesticating foxes, which started showing juvenile, gregarious traits in a few generations of selective breeding. In general felids are social in kittenhood within their family unit, most wild species just "grow out of it" in puberty. Selection pressure (natural or artificial) favoring individuals that tolerate or even enjoy human (or conspecifics') presence favors retention of juvenile traits in adulthood, and this change can happen quite quickly.
Which is exactly what I said. Feral or stray domestic cats form colonies, because domestic cats are more social than their immediate ancestors. The African wildcat is not particularly social, not in the way domestic cats are. Which is why it's interesting.
I’ve always wondered what it would feel like to dream as a cat.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a dream where my body actually changed shape.
Being loved just for existing seems like a pretty solid evolutionary strategy.
> I’ve always wondered what it would feel like to dream as a cat
If you haven't already, read "A Dream of a Thousand Cats", one of the Sandman stories. It was also adapted by Netflix as the last episode of season 1 of The Sandman.
Ignoring the much more obvious explanation that they simply buggered off to do their own thing and there was nobody around to bang a plate with a fork.
That was my first conclusion, too - the absence of something in the fossil record does not mean that it was not there, just that it did not fossilise.
For one, predators in general often have more gracile build, high power to weight ratio - and don’t fossilise well. They’re also much rarer than herbivores, of course. This means the signal in the fossil record is much weaker and any deviation seems much greater, as you have to turn up the gain to get meaningful data.
Perhaps cats during that period were predominantly dry desert hunters - it is a common niche for felidae - and that environment produces checks wristwatch few fossils.
Perhaps there was another critter extant during that period that just found the crunch of cat bones irresistible, and they all got scavenged.
Perhaps they developed culture and cremated their dead.
Dunno. All that said the E-O was a big transition and it likely did result in gigadeaths, and predators would have been harder hit, ultimately and proportionally.
Similar thoughts crossed my mind as well. But then there's the repopulation with a species that can be traced from Asia. The pre-gap felines just aren't part of the post-gap set. If some were descendants of some endemic low-fossilization branch, chances are they'd be connected across the gap through similarities.
> The cat gap is a period in the fossil record of approximately 25 million to 18.5 million years ago in which there are few fossils of cats or cat-like species found in North America.
I once was thinking that if intelligent machines surpassed human intelligence, the end game would be human intelligence would atrophy but the machines would continue to serve us.
Then I had a humorous thought - what if this already happened, i.e. cats were superintelligent, invented humans to serve them and then they had no need for their own intelligence.
It's funny to think that no matter how our technology develops, cats will be right there along for the ride, completely ignorant of it all. It's humorously comforting to think of an interstellar civilization powered by fusion and AGI serving cats just as they're served now. Scratching posts on starships seems to be inevitable.
The domestication of cats happened because of the invention of farming.
If you store grain in a granary, it attracts a lot of insects, rodents, etc. Cats that could tolerate getting close to human settlements found a good food source. And humans like this, because the cats protect the grain without eating it. So you can see why ancient agrarian societies like the Egyptians held cats in high esteem.
And despite only having a few thousand years to adapt to each other, ends up cats and humans can understand each other and form emotional bonds pretty easily.
I imagine we'll see cats on spaceships of the future just like they were the norm on ships in the age of sail.
This seems like a book.
Humans extinct for a billion years, AGI and robots tasked to feed and "take care of the cats".
I imagine entire cities, houses built, all empty save cat and humanform robot.
I would recommend the two episodes "Three Robots" and "Three Robots: Exit Strategies" from the anthology series Love, Death and Robots if you like this kind of humor.
You might like the game Stray. Here's the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJawWyRUOBM
It's about a cat that lives in a city of robots long after humans are extinct.
In the puzzle game series The Talos Principle, intelligent robots (who were made to outlive humanity after a species-ending global pandemic) seem to have the exact same kind of affinity for caring for cats that humans do. It's actually really sweet and cute.
This was a minor plot point in that one black mirror episode with the robots on a tourism trip to Earth, lol
You mean Love, Death and Robots?
I'm sorry, yes, you're right. I misremembered which series I was thinking about.
"There will come soft rains" Ray Bradbury
Obligatory Banks Culture universe reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series
Basically when the "minds" are benevolent deities all scenarios are possible including this one. We can spend our time with cats, we can even turn into cats...as he writes about "Changers" who genetically alter themselves or shift species at whim.
And as always if someone acts up and violates the Golden Rule they get a slap drone: https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/Slap-drone
Maybe the cats were themselves invented by mice?
This is brilliant.
So, if machines will be decent servants to the cats, will humans get x-ed out of the equation?
A topic of the “Three Robots” episode of Death Love & Robots, kind of. Sorry for the fandom link.
https://lovedeathrobots.fandom.com/wiki/Three_Robots#:~:text...
a chicken is an egg's way of producing more eggs.
This is sort of the story of The Time Machine.
Red Dwarf joins the chat
I used to run a Twitter bot called @itsavailable that would mine interesting strings that were not registered .com domains and tweet them out at a regular cadence. One of its sources was the most-visited English-language Wikipedia page titles in the past hour.
One of the only domains I ever bothered purchasing for myself was https://catgap.com
Warning: if you open that link you'll see a woman using her finger pulling apart a hole on a pussy.
You are technically correct (the best kind of correct.)
Hat tip on both your (new?) domain name and your username.
Thank you for brightening my day with your website. That is one adorable (and adorably annoyed-looking) cat.
Don’t click that link!
The woman is pushing the cat's lip up with her finger. It's not painful to the cat.
?
There are many fascinating things about cats, but one of the things I often think about is how interesting it is that an animal of such solitary nature became domesticated so easily, and how social – and socially intelligent – domestic cats came to be, despite stereotypes. To the point that many housecats, and entire breeds, are called "dog-like" in their demeanor. Female feral cats also form social groups, "colonies", though unfixed males are certainly more territorial. This is evidently an example of neoteny, the retention of juvenile traits in adulthood, seeing that most felids do have a social period while living with their mother and littermates.
Cats are actually very social animals, they just don't firm similar pack structures to dogs
With modem technology it became feasible to observe cats without disruption and it showed communal behaviours, including communal care for offspring and IIRC even bringing food to share.
All along the line of somewhat transitionally joined communities instead of more stable groups
Yes, this is (outdoors, stray, or feral) domestic cats, which is exactly what I mentioned. And as I said, it's largely the females and their juvenile offspring that form colonies – unfixed adult males, while certainly capable of having friendly social encounters on "no cat's lands", definitely don't willingly share their territory with other adult males.
But my point was that their immediate ancestor (and practically still the same species – they easily interbreed) the African wildcat is not similarly gregarious, and neither is almost any other felid, big or small.
This is a bit off the mark.
Cats have only been domesticated for like ~10k years, so not much in the way of change or adaptation has happened. So wildcats have the same capacity for forming social bands and such, they just don't in the wild as they don't have any incentive to.
Neoteny is easy to achieve in 10k years. Cf. the Soviet experiments on domesticating foxes, which started showing juvenile, gregarious traits in a few generations of selective breeding. In general felids are social in kittenhood within their family unit, most wild species just "grow out of it" in puberty. Selection pressure (natural or artificial) favoring individuals that tolerate or even enjoy human (or conspecifics') presence favors retention of juvenile traits in adulthood, and this change can happen quite quickly.
There are some interesting reels showing cats apparently learning English using speech buttons.
Cats are very communicative, which suggests they're strongly social, in the broadest sense.
Cats are not so solitary. They can actually live in communities but they are not pack animals
Which is exactly what I said. Feral or stray domestic cats form colonies, because domestic cats are more social than their immediate ancestors. The African wildcat is not particularly social, not in the way domestic cats are. Which is why it's interesting.
"We must close the cat gap." - JFK, 1960
Animals could be bred and... slaughtered...
I’ve always wondered what it would feel like to dream as a cat. I don’t think I’ve ever had a dream where my body actually changed shape. Being loved just for existing seems like a pretty solid evolutionary strategy.
> I’ve always wondered what it would feel like to dream as a cat
If you haven't already, read "A Dream of a Thousand Cats", one of the Sandman stories. It was also adapted by Netflix as the last episode of season 1 of The Sandman.
Thanks — I’ll read it tonight and become a cat in my sleep. Though I suppose I’ll need Scheherazade to guide me there first.
[dead]
Also helps if you are aided by a microbe for your food sources (mice and humans) that rewires their brain to be more attracted to cats.
An obvious failure of the Cat Distribution System.
Ignoring the much more obvious explanation that they simply buggered off to do their own thing and there was nobody around to bang a plate with a fork.
For more cat facts, see CatFACS, cat --help, and man cat.
https://animalfacs.com/catfacs_new
Mr President, we most not allow a cat gap!
This is probably the funniest comment section I've read on HN. Congrats to all.
Cat gap? Divine intervention. The divinity? Cats.
I'm surprised that sampling bias is not in the list. Is it possible that these fossils simply haven't been found yet?
That was my first conclusion, too - the absence of something in the fossil record does not mean that it was not there, just that it did not fossilise.
For one, predators in general often have more gracile build, high power to weight ratio - and don’t fossilise well. They’re also much rarer than herbivores, of course. This means the signal in the fossil record is much weaker and any deviation seems much greater, as you have to turn up the gain to get meaningful data.
Perhaps cats during that period were predominantly dry desert hunters - it is a common niche for felidae - and that environment produces checks wristwatch few fossils.
Perhaps there was another critter extant during that period that just found the crunch of cat bones irresistible, and they all got scavenged.
Perhaps they developed culture and cremated their dead.
Dunno. All that said the E-O was a big transition and it likely did result in gigadeaths, and predators would have been harder hit, ultimately and proportionally.
Similar thoughts crossed my mind as well. But then there's the repopulation with a species that can be traced from Asia. The pre-gap felines just aren't part of the post-gap set. If some were descendants of some endemic low-fossilization branch, chances are they'd be connected across the gap through similarities.
I think the postulation is that the cats would be so abundant, it shouldn't be hard to find their fossils.
have you tried turning the computer off on on?
The cat gap is due to the long time it took for the mutant descendants of Noah's cats to get to America.
Welp. Now I'm in a wikipedia hole of how cats came to be.
The universe was created to incorporate cats.
I was a bit disappointed that this didn't turn out to be analogous to the “bee space”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langstroth_hive#Bee_space
[flagged]
I’m disappointed this wasn’t about felines
So during what period cats were missing?
Duration is clear, start and end not clear
> The cat gap is a period in the fossil record of approximately 25 million to 18.5 million years ago in which there are few fossils of cats or cat-like species found in North America.
25M - 18.5M years ago.
In my defence, word “ago” was on the other line, so I kind of skipped it.