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The only benevolent work that needs to be done on desalination is R&D and likely not even that because all the pieces for dirt cheap abundant desalinized water are already being worked on. Desalination costs are roughly 1/3 energy 1/3 capital costs and 1/3 maintenance.

On energy the 4th generation portable nuclear plants using thorium or waste nuclear fuel promise to drop energy costs by 1/2 or better in volume. In the USA the companies working on that are Flibe, Terrapower, Transatomic and a new entry which looks impressive based on their staff called—Martingale. There’s also a canadian company which the DOE has seen fit to support —over american companies—called Terrestrial. There http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2015/01/07/nuclear-power-turns-to-salt/

These systems are all +-5 years to pilot and 10 years to production. (this is going to happen unlike fusion which is always 20 years away. )

On maintenance/energy “Engineers at Lockheed-Martin recently developed and patented a molecular filtration membrane called Perforene which can desalinate seawater using only 1/100th the energy of the best existing desalination systems.”
http://www.greenprophet.com/2014/12/graphene-nanotechnology-makes-desalination-100-times-more-efficient/

engineers still need to figure out how to produce graphene to spec on industrial scales. but I’ve seen regular improvements there. I think that’s five years away or less. There are companies around who already say they can do it. but conservatively speaking it will likely be five years before the kinks are got out of production to spec for desalination membranes.

Likely 3d printing will collapse capital costs in desalination plants. As well as newer/better/faster maintenance free materials are coming out all the time because of the ongoing revolution in materials research which will lower the cost of maintenance because salt is very corrosive.

One thing that has not had much attention paid to is finding ways to turn Na and Cl into useful industrial products. Though there are several companies that currently do so. Few desalination plants actually do this. Rather they dilute the brine and send back out to sea. This causes problems with the environmentalists.