THE BUS. Isn't it marvellous? Well no, not always. Not in rush hour. Not when it's full of pesky kids with mobile phones. Not when there's a clinically-diagnosed schizophrenic wrongly cast back into society who has not taken his anti-psychotic drugs, making loud repetitive noises in the seat next to you while trying to catch your increasingly traumatised eye.

But sometimes, especially in the big city, the bus is truly marvellous, like some cocooned retreat from reality, a day-dream-driven mini oasis on chauffeur-driven wheels. From a double-decker's top deck, especially, you can forget the bedlam below and stare, instead, at some historically gripping architecture, maybe a meandering mid-city river, perhaps the pleasant roll of yonder, infinite hills. Or at least you could, until now.

"There are seats available on the upper deck," parped the robotic, automated, woman's voice on the bus home the other day. Then it happened again, seemingly louder. "There are seats available on the upper deck!" Then, again, seemingly blaring: "There are seats available on the upper deck!!!"

Meanwhile, rolling along the front wall of the upper deck on the digital display came the very same instruction: "There are seats available on the upper deck." No wonder, then, if you were the bloke newly alighted onto the bus and now marching upstairs you would have expected, indeed, at least one seat to be available on the upper deck. But no, the upstairs deck was full.

And so there he stood, upstairs, perhaps thinking if the "authority" had got it wrong, he might just get away with it. "No standing on the upper deck!" blared our robotic pal, as Bewildered Of North London trooped downstairs, away from exactly the illegal position he'd been automated into.

And then our robot chum told us many more things we couldn't possibly have known without her (and yes, handy if you're deaf or blind but you probably don't need wrong instructions or a thundering headache either) concerning the presence of closed-circuit television, the name of every stop on the way, over and over and over again, the name of the final destination until the destination was suddenly "diverted!" and your brain exploded like a malfunctioning computer in a 1950s B-movie, all infinite reams of unravelling tape spewing yards of cross-scrambled data. Like On The Buses, indeed, never happened Here in London (and therefore on its way to a bus near you) we've just been introduced to the state-of-the-art automatic vehicle location technology system called, inevitably enough, the iBus.

Costing £117million and currently being installed in 8000 London buses, this is an actual UK public transport "revolution" (trumpets the London Transport website), a cross-communication journey system where the following (within three years) will be possible.

1. "You will receive an up-to-the-minute SMS text on your mobile phone as you walk out of your house." (The new "good morning!", then, is an automated beep-beep-beep bombarding your synapses about minute-based bus minutiae before you've even closed your front-door.) 2. "As you arrive at the bus stop you can confirm on the Countdown display that your bus will arrive in an accurately predicted time." (We're all trainspotters now.) 3. "After boarding the bus you feel reassured as an on-board sign and voice announcement tells you your next stop." (Reassured that no-one will ever speak to a bus driver again, or any other person on a bus, as the bus, just like the office before it, via emails, becomes a speech-free zone, apart from the madman, inevitably, still hollering up the back).

Most curious of all is the prediction that this will alter the very nature of human existence, this infallible, interactive, data-bank system ensuring "three of the same number buses arriving at once at a bus stop will be a thing of the past".

But but but ... we live our very lives by these codas! What next? No more foreboding voices saying "ooh, these things happen in threes"? No more "it doesn't rain but it pours"? No more "Britain's a nation of queuers"?

Not in Tesco, certainly, where exactly the same thing is happening; a way of life being replaced by "if you queue, we'll open a new till" pledges and the automatic self-service checkout - which everyone ignores through barcode terror. This week, when I attempted for the first time to embrace this brave new world of buying the messages, a Tesco official came to my aid, brusquely placing an un-beeped kiwi fruit into the machine-held carrier bag. Suddenly, our automated pal was back again. "Unidentified item in the baggage area!" she blared as we were told to "await further assistance".

And so you go home, brain pummelled, wondering whatever happened to science fiction? We should be flying, by now, in cars, time-travelling through the weekend, living in silvery pods on Mars. Instead, we're deliberately, at the cost of millions, making it considerably more annoying, confusing and ironically time-consuming to get on and off the average bus on the way, quite possibly, to purchasing a very small piece of cleverly-imported fruit with unforseeably stupefying results.

Science fiction's starry-eyed freedoms, in fact, have become the straitjacket of technological reality; human beings now stop-watched automatons living under bleating orders and the twitching eye of the all-seeing stern-faced Beak.

In other words: contemporary life as a continuous episode of prison-life sitcom Porridge. (Without any of Fletch's fabulous jokes, either. The nerks.