Goals

During a First, anything can be done. That's how sure people are of their superiority - if they feel at all superior, anyway.

That's one explanation for the boundless optimism of the Dartmouth Artificial Intelligence Conference of 1956. The proposal stated that

We think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer.

The possible problems  to be solved that summer included natural language use,  creativity, and (at a high level) simulating the human brain. Watson probably counts for the first one, so that's one down roughly 55 years later...

Just for the sake of prediction using the tools at hand, the people behind the proposal were probably G.I. Generation, figuring that they could do anything and that teamwork and focus were all that was missing.

For which the answer is: Almost. Of the four men who proposed the conference, two were born in 1927 (Silent), one in 1919, and one in 1916 (both G.I.).