There are other ambitious people who max out their limits at normal human baselines. Human vs human videogames are a popular activity, and very high status for the people who practice.
An idea for a story in this universe:
There is a large group of people who desire to live "normal human lives", some of them for reasons religious or political, but most of them for reasons cultural. Also, to stay in contact with their families and friends, because many unaugmented people do not wish to interact with augmented people: it is no fun to "play by the rules" when people around you are cheating. So the traditionalists have a very specific definition of what "normal human lives" mean, and if you don't follow the rules, you are not allowed to live among them.
(If you augment, you can stay in some form of contact with your family, such as e-mails or low-resolution videos. The traditionalists do not want to see themselves as the bad guys who break families apart. But they will basically treat you like an unfriendly AI they need to protect themselves from.)
Among the traditionalists, some of them are true believers who play it fair, but many of them are trying to push the boundary of what is technically allowed. For example, John von Neumann was a human, so it is technically allowed to make yourself exactly as smart as John von Neumann, but not a single IQ point smarter. (There is a superhuman friendly AI that tries to be mostly invisible, who verifies that people follow the rules. If won't physically stop you from breaking the rules, but it will notify you when you are going to do so, and if you do, it will snitch on you, and you will get expelled by the traditionalist human community.)
By following the rules technically, while violating their spirit, you can make yourself as good at anything as the best unaugmented human ever, but not an inch further. You are allowed to maximize in multiple dimensions in parallel, for example you can be both John von Neumann and Mozart and Shakespeare etc. But you are limited in all dimensions. This is kinda frowned upon by most traditionalists, but it is technically legal and won't get you expelled.
Another "problem" for the traditionalists is immortality. Most of them actually don't want to die (or rather, those who did have already sorted themselves out of the game). Fixing your health and extending your lifespan are permitted exceptions from the natural human life. But this causes a problem -- even a normal natural human could accumulate "abnormal" amount of experience in 1000 years or more, and the society of immortal vampires wouldn't be a normal human society anymore. So in return for fixing your health, the AI also caps your ability and experience to what can be "naturally" achieved in, let's say, 120 years.
For example, if you want to become the world's best chess player ever, better than literally any human in history, you are allowed to do that, if you (1) achieve it using the natural means, (2) during the first 120 years of your life. After your 120th birthday, your chess playing ability will be artificially limited by the peak of natural human ability, and if you try to train harder, the AI will artificially keep you at the limit. (You can object against that, but then you get excluded from the traditionalist community. And there is no point competing at chess with the galaxy brains.)
The consequence of these rules is that the people who push the boundaries of "natural human skills" are extremely high status in some parts of the traditionalist society. Because they push the boundaries of how far anyone can legally augment, while still being considered technically baseline. It requires a relatively rare combination of wanting to stay unaugmented (either for social reasons or because you believe that this is the only Schelling point before losing your humanity), but also wanting to push the boundary, and conscientiousness to work hard for decades on something (because the lowest hanging fruit has already been picked). But the idea is that after 120 years of hard work, you become an immortal celebrity forever (as opposed to merely being a normal human forever, or augmenting yourself until you no longer feel human).
Ok, this is not literally a story, just a setting within your setting, but it gives the immortal humans living in a post-scarcity society something to compete for.
Summary:
I guess the career of a natural human ability pusher is something that your parents have to choose for you, because if you get a legal augment as a teenager, you are thereby disqualified from the attempt.
This is an interesting idea. However, I don't really think it is really 'utopian' in the spirit that I wrote this short story in.
For someone to uplift, they would usually need to do so in the way that would be allowed by a superintelligent AI who cares deeply for humanity. Most likely, before breaking the rules and voluntarily choosing to be uplifted, they'd have a chat with a superintelligent AI about whether they really want to do this. I don't expect anyone to get kicked out from their home unexpectedly.
I expect that this chat also involves the community. Friends and family comment on it. A superintelligent AI shows you vivid futures of exactly what you're getting yourself into when you ask to transcend human limits, or when you ask to birth a child who transcends those limits.
In general, I don't expect to see many 'rule maximizers' or human optimizers like MrBeast (MrBeast is essentially a human optimizer for the YT algorithm), since this is a utopia. People on the very edge of superhuman performance would probably get gently voted out or guided somewhere else.
I do think there is a fair amount of status competition in these utopias. I think the rule boundaries are relatively fuzzy in general, though; if you are a 120-year old vampire, you might be gently guided against going to the 30-40 adults league baseball game. Or, you might get a special role in the baseball game, like a traveling vampire who shows up to help the losing team whose morale is at rock bottom.
There are many diverse utopias within this framework, stretching from traditional hunter gatherers, people living in a happier replica of the 18th century, and people living in a more perfect modern age without visible AI.
I wake up. It is 2035, and the day of my Operation.
Humanity is no longer competitive with AI, but fortunately, the AIs retain a deep love of humanity. There are many diverse areas of Earth, separated into communities with similar values. This was always the natural affair of things, but it has gotten significantly stronger.
There are also many common areas, and the common areas are more friendly and less predatory than they used to be in the older days of the internet. I remember having to build AI-powered filters so I could read twitter and stay sane, but now there's natural policing and the discourse and behavior in public spaces, both online and in-person, is typically quite friendly and culturally very open.
Although I'm fascinated by AI, modern AIs have become rather incomprehensible to me, and I value my relationships with other humans the most. So, although I occasionally go on adventures and interact with huge AIs like the ones that orbit the sun, I mainly enjoy a chill existence with little cute cat-like robot vacuum cleaners and invisible cleaning drones, who are sort of strands/distillations of the greater AIs and don't dizzy my mind.
Today, though, I am leaving some of this normalcy behind.
...
I'm back. I'm still a little woozy from the operation, and I can feel the little seams in the skin on my head where my brain was opened up. It's a pretty weird thing to think about, but I forget it about relatively quickly.
...
It's a few days later now. I'm practicing controlling things mentally with my new neural lace. It's learning to read my mind. Right now, I'm just practicing in front of the TV. I glare intently at a candle on the screen, imagine heat, and suddenly, the candle bursts into flames. I'm quite surprised, and then I'm thrilled. There are a lot of mental 'buttons' that I'm getting familiar with, and projecting 'heat' is now one of them.
Soon, I can imagine all kinds of things. Although my mental efforts felt clumsy at first, now I can open doors at will, summon little cleaning robots, or even do basic telepathy with one of my siblings, who also has a neural lace.
...
Okay, it's been a few months now, and I have to say, controlling magic in VR with a neural lace is epic. I've learned to fly, throw air slashes, do telekinesis, and even rewind time. All of these are basically just controls in my mind, but they've become super satisfying to use. I can even control my body to a higher degree now; I sort of have a 'second subconscious' that uses AI to allow me to move more precisely.
When I played the piano as a teenager, I never played it consciously. Even before AI, my hands move on their own over the keys, in a hard-won pattern of muscle memory and I merely keep myself consciously in the groove. I don't choose each note, only the song and intensity.
Now, I can throw a baseball and hit a bottle 50 feet away every time. I can curve a frisbee to my brother behind a tree. There is still a bit of muscle memory required, but it doesn't deteriorate like it used to, and I learn physical things faster.
...
It's been a year. The neural lace came with nanotechnology. It's, uh, weird to think about, but this nanotechnology is eating and replacing little pieces of brain each night. Neurons are pruned and then replaced by a type of artificial neuron. Normal neurons transmit at the speed of sound; these artificial neurons now transmit to each other at the speed of light.
The effect of this is that each day, I wake up and think imperceptibly faster and clearer. It's like becoming an adult again. I can already choose to slow time in real life, though this will give me a headache if I do it for more than a few seconds or so.
I'm a little uncomfortable with the idea of increasing my intelligence directly. When I was a kid, I was put on various types of ADHD medicine. One of these made me incredibly smart but also quite cold and depressed. I remember being in the throes of depression at night as a kid, rocking back and forth in bed, praying to be less smart as thoughts of math and existentialism washed over me.
Besides, not everyone in my family plans to undergo the operation for a neural lace, so I plan to voluntarily cap my intelligence at normal levels for a few years or decades and just improve my physical and subconscious instincts. My brother already says that I have an unfair advantage when we play sports, so I've dialed that skill back a little, though it is pretty frustrating to have amazing physical skill recede and then be stuck in a somewhat clumsier body. But, for love of the game (with my siblings), I'll accept it.
...
Nanotechnology is pretty cool.
I just recently went on an adventure and spoke with one of the great minds orbiting the solar system. Every time I speak with them, I am left awed and humbled. I am really glad that they like me, although I get the sense they think I'm cute, which is an odd feeling for a 40-ish year old man who is raising children. Throughout the singularity, I've retained my sense of sincerity, so I'm always happy to express my thoughts to these great AIs, the same way I might be curious about what a child thinks or what a little talking mouse might have to say.
Anyways, my brain is now fully artificial. I still feel like me, even though none of my original neurons remain. If I wanted to, I could vastly increase my intelligence or think roughly 100x faster. But, I don't really need to. I spend most of my days constructing huge VR worlds for work and teaching my children along the way. I live near my family and many friends often come visit. I am not especially ambitious, but there are things I like to be good at, and designing VR worlds is definitely one of those.
Somewhere out in the cosmos, there are some truly ambitious people. They've uplifted themselves into vast digital minds akin to large AIs and live on huge datacenters. They have human memory and identity that has carried over to their digital form, but I think they've lost something too. They would probably not think that, but I do. I value normalcy a lot, which is a funny thing to say, considering that my brain is now fully artificial and that I technically have a backup of myself on a datacenter in case some kind of crazy accident happens to me.
There are other ambitious people who max out their limits at normal human baselines. Human vs human videogames are a popular activity, and very high status for the people who practice. There are a lot of rules about allowed augmentations, most of which are constructed by large AIs to perfectly satisfy the public's latent intent around fair play.
In the end, there are many paths to human agency in a world with superintelligent AIs, but the slow and winding path of gradual transformation and nanotechnology is my favorite.
(posted as part of a draft I procrastinated on submitting for like two years)