Daniel S. Nevins
Conservative Rabbi
The Conservative rabbi and former dean of JTS’s rabbinical school wrote the movement’s official ruling on artificial intelligence — concluding that AI “may provide valuable assistance” so long as a human keeps moral responsibility.
In his words
While AI and autonomous machines may provide valuable assistance to humans in making and implementing momentous decisions, a human must remain responsible, especially for matters of life and death.
Biography
Rabbi Daniel S. Nevins (born 1966) is an American Conservative (Masorti) rabbi and, for over a decade, the Pearl Resnick Dean of the Rabbinical School at the Jewish Theological Seminary. He is a scholar of halakhah — Jewish law — and a member of the movement’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, the body that issues binding legal opinions for Conservative Judaism.
A rabbinic ruling on machines
In June 2019 the committee approved Nevins’s responsum “Artificial Intelligence, Moral Machines, and Halakhah,” a nearly fifty-page teshuvah that measures autonomous systems against Jewish categories of agency, liability, and responsibility. Rather than reject the technology, Nevins treats AI as a genuine and welcome aid to human decision-making — from medicine to warfare — while insisting that accountability can never be delegated to a machine.
The boundary between human and artificial life is significant and must be maintained.
His conclusion is cautiously affirmative: the tools are permissible, even valuable, but a person must stay in the loop for consequential and life-and-death choices. It is one of the earliest attempts by any major religious body to bring an ancient legal tradition to bear on machine autonomy.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/daniel-nevins