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comment by Killerhurtz

That logic does not hold. The creators, the marketers, and the insurance companies all need to think of it.

For instance, similar logic for self-driving cars (that is being debated): since there is no driver, they do not know who is liable when one of them hits a pedestrian - is it the manufacturer for not making the car good enough? Is it the owner for owning it? Never EVER do they spin it as being the pedestrian's fault, even though our current technology (in the parameters that it is approved to run in - clear vision, no rain, dry ground) would see that happen SPECIFICALLY only if someone ran from behind an obstruction - surprise is the only way to cause these issues. Yet they still debate whose life should have priority, and what steps to take, because they cannot allow a machine to purposefully kill or hurt someone no matter what are the circumstances - so they need to have provision for these edge cases that even humans cannot do. They completely disregard the reduction, if not elimination at long term, of road accidents by removing all human factors from driving. They disregard all of the advantages. All of that because the car can't, right now (if ever) deal with some idiot jumping in front of the car - if it does not do anything, the passenger is hurt and that's bad. If it swerves, it most likely will hurt other people and that's bad. And if it swerves and hits something and causes damage and hurts the passenger, that's also bad.

So you bet your sweet ass that they are considering this - because the MOMENT someone dies of something preventable by listening, it's going to be blamed on the device that removed that sound from their hearing and not the person itself for turning that sound off.

Rule of thumb for companies and corporations: when machines, devices and computers are involved, humans are never EVER the problem - it's always the machine/device's design that failed for not accounting for people who uses it or interact with it like they do. It's also the reason why, barring that, there's warnings for everything about everything - even inhaling paint.

(and of course that's a nightmare for the engineer/programmer/designer stuck at the other end, because 99% of the time they're dealing with idiots)