It's 2013, where's my flying car?

• It's the 21st century, why don't we have world peace?

• It's 2013, where's my flying car?

Is there a name for this kind of bad argument?

Solution 1:

Both are classical non sequiturs, if you ask me, masquerading as rhetorical questions.

Non sequitur (Latin for "it does not follow"), in formal logic, is an argument in which its conclusion does not follow from its premises. In a non sequitur, the conclusion could be either true or false, but the argument is fallacious because there is a disconnection between the premise and the conclusion. All invalid arguments are special cases of non sequitur.

Just because it's 2013, doesn't mean there should be world peace or flying cars. There is no connection whatsoever. It's just a completely random number, as good as any other.

Solution 2:

What you have there is called a comma-splice error because you are attempting to join two independent clauses together with a comma that does not have a coördinating conjunction following it instead of using a semicolon or colon.

Solution 3:

The example sentences you posted are not examples of "bad arguments" as you presume. To call them "bad arguments" is to miss the point. They are not meant to be logical arguments, or even arguments at all.

Rather, they are poetical ways of poking fun at overly-optimistic cultural myths about what the the future holds. This could probably best be described as a form of irony; it is an incongruity between past cultural expectations about the present state of progress and the actual present state of progress.