Comment by dredmorbius

This is a plot point in a sci-fi story I'd read recently, though I cannot place what it was. Possibly in Cloud Atlas, or something by Liu Cixin.

In other contexts, someone I knew had written a system to generate automated emails in response to various online events. They later ran into someone who'd written automated processing systems to act on those emails. This made the original automater quite happy.

(Context crossed organisational / institutional boundaries, there was no explicit coordination between the two.)