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.
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.