In Rubber Souls, Bjartus Tomas argues that we can have cruely-free status games by creating underpeople without moral worth, perhaps because they are non-conscious, worth to serve as our permanent underclass. This removes the current problem where some poor bugger has to be at the bottom of the barrel, or the bottom quarter or half or so forth. 

Needless to say, I approve. 

But I think it's worth fleshing out a bit why this is possible, and why you won't wind up with everyone associating humans as a high status source of esteem as underpeople as a low status source. 

We build our sense of self-worth not from some abstract global ranking, such as percentile ranking of wealth or h-index, but through comparing ourselves to people in our social circles. So in the glorious transhumanist future where the labs somehow avoid flubbing it, Dario Amodei may be God-Emperor of the universe, but as long as he's far from your social graph, and your social graph has nary a whisper of him, then you're not likely to compare yourself with him and feel low self-esteem. 

More generally, I expect the far future to have less global status rankings because I expect everything to run at much higher speeds, making fixed travel times feel proportionally longer. If a mind ran 1,000,000,00x faster than us, for them light would only a foot/subjective second, or a measly 1km in a subjective hour. Which means it's harder to communicate and co-ordinate across the total span of human civilization, resulting in smaller, disjoint cultures with their own local hierarchies. 

Secondly, humans have very coarse personhood detectors. Let alone AIs like GPT-4o, we've even treated animals or inanimate objects as people in the past. It's just quite easy to convince our brains that a non-human entity is a person. This makes sense; how could evolution have encoded something as complex as a human detector when building our social reward circuitry? No, it had to make do with mere proxies instead. 

And that means there are bound to be very strange entities we can construct that would count as valid sources of status in the future. Yes, stranger even than LLMs. And probably more effective than humans, to boot. 

So if we build these super-stimuli status sirens, these underpeople forming our permanent underclass, who might I add could well be pleased to be permanent yes-man for mind design space is wide, could we truly say we wouldn't gladly partake of them? 

Yes, perhaps we would view associating with them as abhorrent at first. But for those who are stuck at the bottom of the status hierarchies of utopia, their need for social esteem would compel them to at least try it out. Then, deep in the midst of the underpeople's social scene, would it truly seem so bad? I think not.