The list of Nobel laureates reads like a collection of humanity’s greatest treasures: Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Francis Crick, Toni Morrison. As of this morning, it also includes two physicists whose research, in the 1980s, laid the foundations for modern artificial intelligence.

Two scientists credited with laying the “foundation of today’s powerful machine learning,” University of Toronto professor emeritus Geoffrey Hinton and Princeton University professor John Hopfield, were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics today.

John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton — won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for helping create the building blocks of machine learning that is revolutionizing the way we work and live but also creates new threats for humanity.