Have you read or watched what the picbreeder author is actually about? It's not about a greater horizon. It's that you only get "valuable results" by using a heuristic that only looks at the very next steps, and completely ignoring any goals that would lie further ahead. You could say that he's promoting a greedy search with very broad success parameters.
An example: You plan to be a millionaire, and you currently have nothing in the bank. How do you get there? Any plan would most probably not work, if executed in a rigid manner (or we would all look up the recipe on the internet and be millionaires). You end up trying all kinds of jobs, investments, take opportunities when they arise, etc.. and finally you realize that you probably will not ever make it. Or you get lucky and make your million - who knows. Picbreeder showed that it's quite rare to hit the very desired result you wanted.
However, if you were more flexible regarding your goal, at every step, then you might take the job that agrees the most with you, meet a lot of great people, travel if you are able, start a family.. and end up without a million in the bank but with a satisfying life situation. With pic breeder, certain shapes and beautiful pictures emerged that were not intended or planned from the start. The algorithm went along with whatever was there, and optimized on that.
Looking at the millionaire example again - if you already had 500k, then doubling that might not be that hard (?), or not that many steps away. People keep saying that the more money you have, the easier it is to earn - think opportunities like buying an apartment in a firesale and reselling it for 1.5 as much.
For me, it's a very counter intuitive way of looking at things. It goes very deep against the wanting of goals or things in our current society. OTOH, it somehow makes sense that things work this way, because every step in our step-by-step plans is SO dependent on things beyond our control. Agile development methods remind me of this very much: Try telling a customer not familiar with agile that the software she orders might look completely different than she imagines it right now - most will think you are crazy or want to cheat them. But you might recognize problems in every sprint, and adapt the end goal accordingly.