38C3

Robot Uprising: a story-driven AI robotics experience
2024-12-29 , Saal 1
Language: English

It's the 2040’s. The dusty skyline of Helsinki is covered with vertical buildings reaching for the clouds. Autonomous drones deliver messages and items from layer to layer while robots maintain the aerial pathways across buildings. A sense of tension hangs in the air.

Somewhere beneath the surface, hackers and corporates wage war over AI. Will they be able to master it, or will the City succumb to a dark technology?

Perhaps you can change the fate of things?


Do you like deep-diving into AI & robotics, but wish you could escape the inevitable existential dread of techno-capitalist dystopia? If acting it out through a story-driven hackathon sounds interesting, we might just have the right thing for you.

Robot Uprising is a community-organised, story-driven AI & robotics event series. Part LARP, part hackfest, part robotics competition, it all neatly fits together under the umbrella of an overarching cyberpunk story. The story provides inspiration for the events, the events provide the "historical facts" that shape how the narrative develops.

In this talk, we'll take you through the history of Robot Uprising, delve into the technologies (robotics or otherwise) explored through our events, and contemplate how story and hacking intertwine.

Our hope is to convince you of the awesomeness of story-driven hacking and inspire you to create many more events like this all around the world.

See also:

Karim Hamdi is a creative technologist specialised in AI, IoT and Robotics.

He first got involved in the German hacker scene in 2013 as one of the main organisers of Make Munich, Germany's first maker festival, then as one of the co-founders of the Munich Maker Lab, continuing on to hosting workshops and temporary hackerspaces at events like Hedo Congress.

After moving to Finland and joining Robot Uprising early in 2024, he knew he found something the crowd at the congress absolutely had to know about.

Representing as a vice chair of Robot Uprising. I’m working in tech by day, playing with robots or hacking by night.

Co-Founder of the Robot Uprising Hackathon in Finland and Chairman of the Robot Uprising Association.