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Here's some thing crazy. What if Amazon could send you stuff you want to buy, before you buy it. The Wall Street Journal unearthed a recently-filed Amazon patent for "anticipatory shipping." The idea is that the products you buy start coming to you before you've even clicked the purchase button.

Amazon would consider things like previous orders and searches, wish lists and the time your cursor spends hovering over a listing to determine what to pre-ship where.

The patent even says that packages without a recipient name might be speculatively shipped directly to multi-family residences (like apartment buildings) based on the predictive model.

For now, such predictive powers only exist on patent paperwork. But imagine if it were to make the jump to reality.