Hinton has been widely credited as a godfather of artificial intelligence and made headlines when he quit his job at Google last year to be able to more easily speak about the dangers of the technology he had pioneered.
"We have no experience of what it's like to have things smarter than us," Hinton said over the phone to the Nobel press conference, speaking from a hotel in California.
Hopfield, 91, a professor emeritus at Princeton University, created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the prize, said.
The award comes with a prize sum of 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million) which is shared by the two winners.