I've seen them often, the cartels' numberless autonomous sea drones, each one carrying legal cargo or machinery, meeting briefly and by their own profit-optimizing market-aware choice to build something illegal to sell for cryptocurrency off some shore.
I'm tracking dolphins, not them, and the sea is too big for their encounters to be so frequent and long. I think they are interacting, drones and dolphins, and I don't think the cartels programmed them to. It must be somehow profitable, I guess.
It feels like a first contact between species I don't belong to.