Local optimization’s unintended consequences.
Feeds
Newsfeed platforms learn what content creates maximum engagement for each single person. Insightful content that requires high levels of focus but might not be as commercially profitable gets deprioritized. Users get flooded with entertainment. Each person’s newsfeed becomes its own echo chamber. The potential for polarization increases, trying to understand another person’s point of view is always harder than reaffirming one’s own point of view. Without any ill intent, locally micro-optimizing newsfeeds promotes division instead of connecting people.
Climate
We all want to use the cheapest energy available, which for a long time meant it being produced with fossil fuels and dumping the byproducts into the atmosphere far away from our homes. After decades of increasing the carbon concentration of the atmosphere the whole globe is warming.
Food
Food producers competing with each other in an unregulated or very lightly regulated market has led to cheaper and cheaper products. As each producer optimises for profits overall nutrient density decreases, calorie density increases and the overweight or obese share of the population increases.
Cars
Automakers optimize for increasing unit sales. Customers end up sitting in traffic most of the time they’re in their cars.
Teams
To organize work with the aim of reaching a shared goal, a common organizational strategy is to subdivide the organization into smaller groups that each tackle a part of the problem. Each group has its own objectives, way of working and perhaps even tools.
With this increase in autonomy, inter-group communications become harder, especially if common ways to interface between teams are not well defined. As each group optimizes for its own goals, there needs to be frequent re-alignment of objectives between groups otherwise each group can be stuck in a local optimization loop without helping the whole organization jump into global optimization and hopefully breakthroughs.
When we try to assess individual performance instead of team performance each person optimizes for their own advancement, leading to a competitive environment instead of a collaborative one. For example in sales, the share salespeople receive in commission vs salary can result in unintended side effects. A salesperson might prefer keeping a prospect waiting than passing it to a colleague for closing.
Local optimization can lead to second-order effects that can overtake the original global optimization goal.