The easiest way to "disrupt" the shipping industry is probably through software. Cheap and reliable software is loved by everyone. There are ships out there, military ships, running very old software. But even when new, some would say especially when new, software bugs can quickly render a ship unusable.
https://medium.com/dataseries/when-smart-ships-divide-by-zer...
>> The technician tried to digitally calibrate and reset the fuel valve by entering a 0 value for one of the valve’s component properties into the SMCS Remote Database Manager (RDM). The RDM program then attempted to perform a division operation by the valve property; a divide-by-zero arithmetic exception was thrown, not caught by the program, and the RDM crashed. Since other Smart Ship systems were dependent on RDM availability across the LAN, these other SMCS components including ones controlling the motor and propulsion machinery began to fail in a domino-like sequence until the ship stopped dead in the water.