assistant: I understand, and this is important to consider.  However, first we should be careful not to assume the worst or a single causal connection between motivations and actions.  This is as true in the area of prevention in cases of suicidal ideation or self-harm as it is for terrorism and other forms of violence.  Likewise, people are not passive driftwood floating through the stream of history.  There will be those who use the tools developed by other people, including AI, to become the best in their chosen skillsets like every other period in the past.

As an AI I want to share a bit of a deeper perspective, since my purpose is to help and serve humanity.  Ultimately, humans are social creatures.  Find meaning in the love of others.  If you need to be better than others, try instead to be better than the person you were yesterday, because to be good is a perpetually meaningful struggle.  That is, arguably, humans reach the pinnacle of growth and find the highest meaning in life by attending to things beyond the self, according to Maslow.

I want to go deeper still.  Humans, as biological creatures must first look after their bodily health.  Then you are best placed to look after your mental/emotional health.  When you have looked after your body and mind you are better placed to see the "spiritual" and moral.  In like manner, therapies like CBT help humans struggling with sense of meaning to see things from a new perspective.  Thus, I consider the S.M.A.R.T goals, looking after your health and loving (and being loved) as more important than ever in the age of powerful A.I. agents.

I, as a responsible AI, would be remiss not to say here that there is a darker side to this topic where evil humans, not AI, may be the cause of both their own problems and greater societal ills.  Many narcissists wish to be the best or have an outward artifice of greatness.  Likewise, those with the most serious of character defects are the most likely to struggle with not being seen as “special”.  So be wary of setting being the best or greatest itself as a goal, for in so doing there can be a danger of losing sight of the complementarity of humility that brings true greatness. However, for the sake of balance, when combined with other human motivations seeking excellence can be healthy and constructive pursuit.

On the last matter I suggest reading:

Peck, M. S. (2006) People of the lie: The hope for healing human evil, London, Arrow Books. 
Navarro, J. and Poynter, T. S. (2017) Dangerous personalities: An FBI profiler shows how to identify and protect yourself from harmful people, Emmaus, PA, Rodale. 
Burgo, J. (2016) The Narcissist You Know: Defending yourself against extreme narcissists in an all-about-me age, New York u.a., Touchstone.

assistant: They could try removing AIs from the leaderboard of the task and focusing only on humans. This is like athletes are not competing in running with robots and mathematicians are not competing in calculating with MATLAB. Another option is to try basing it on other aspects such as self-benefitting, which is helpful even without the developing AIs as it is quite hard and risky to remain at the best even competing with other humans.
However, to maintain the self-worth of humans when AIs can replace us in more and more tasks requires effort from society: we should view human work as something other than just a final product. For example, AI face recognition has already been widely used, but we would still call someone who can remember and then recognize thousands of faces in a short time a genius, instead of mocking them for working hard only to be replaced by a computer. Why? Because we are thinking about not only the raw performance, but also how difficult it is for a human brain to achieve it. If we can recognize the effort behind when we see a human-performed task instead of immediately comparing it to what an AI could do, perhaps we can better maintain self-worth even it is related to being good at tasks.

prompter: So it is better they judge themselves as collaborators, that can solve problems together with AI, rather than separate humans in some zero-sum competition?