Can digital contexts persist as identity after someone dies?

Against the framing of context engineering as a sudden agent-era innovation, this paper argues it is a long-evolving discipline traceable to early-1990s HCI, passing through phases shaped by machine intelligence: human-computer interaction around primitive computers, today's human-agent interaction driven by intelligent agents, and potentially human-level or superhuman intelligence ahead. The unifying challenge across phases is bridging human intent and machine understanding under varying levels of entropy.

The keeper is the philosophical turn in the conclusion — digital presence. Reading Marx ("the human essence is the ensemble of social relations") computationally, the paper argues individuals are increasingly defined not by physical presence but by the digital contexts they generate — conversations, decisions, interaction traces. These contexts can persist, evolve, and continue to interact with the world through AI systems long after the person departs. The mind may not be uploadable, but the context can be — turning context itself into a lasting form of knowledge, memory, and identity.

This is a strong contribution to Adrian's meaning/identity thread. It complements the technical Why can language models understand context better than generate it? with a historical-and-philosophical frame, and it extends How does AI context differ from conventional software context?: where that note stresses context's volatility within a session, this one stresses its persistence across a lifetime — context as a durable digital self.