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Thanks!
I'm also interested in the research you mention, but I think it is a special case of this general human behaviour.
It's not only related to software. Any tool that "makes the task easier" will render the task harder in the long run. Modern agriculture got easier for farmers, until so much productivity became the expected norm that it became an extremely hard job. Communication technology made it easy to keep in contact with loved ones, but now jobs expect people to move very far as if it was nothing. Solving a problem through a t…
The task did get easier in the short term and in the long term. The only thing that changed was the task itself.
Local job markets were the only practical thing for most people, but if you found a job somewhere else, you wrote a letter. Farming took dozens (or more?) of people per farm, now it's done by a small team if not a couple -- the task isn't to farm to provide a living or feed your family, it's to supply tons and tons of foodstuffs to a global economy.
Similarly, you can now call or video chat with your immediate family when they're at the store, while you're working from home -- or even if you're in an office 20 mins away. And if you wanted to run a small farm, you can now do that, providing for your family and maybe even generating a small income (see YouTube for homestead channels).
The way I see it, there are a few different kinds of software.
An old kind is something like using a spreadsheet instead of an abacus or punch cards, using a word processor instead of a typewriter, email instead of snail mail / fax machine, etc. In this case, you're using computers/software to increase the efficiency of some external, real-world, non-computer thing, and it works pretty well, especially if you have a complicated logistical problem like running a big warehouse, airline, bank, etc.
Another kind is software that talks to other software, like a trading algorithm, exchange, a search engine or spam filter where the inputs to your software are the outputs from some other person's software. In this kind of software, there is never any permanent outcome/result, it's just a never-ending arms race where you write some software that temporarily produces better results, but then the other side figures out a more elaborate way to exploit it and get through the filter or better SEO results or whatever, and then you obfuscate some more / change again, etc.
Unfortunately, more and more software is now in the latter camp :(
"Increasing Complexity" — as an E-type system evolves, its complexity increases unless work is done to maintain or reduce it
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehman%27s_laws_of_software_...