Maybe we just need to spoonfeed them. Give concrete examples.

"How many scientists do you think work on biology R&D? How much better do you think medicine has gotten in the past 40 years? What things do you think are possible with unlimited money and effort?" First establish that the answers are "just a few million", "massively" and "anything natural biology already does". Clarify that they understand these ideas - ask them if catgirls are possible, ensure they understand the answer is "yes". No need to go into Drexler's nanosystems - for normies, if it doesn't exist yet, you'll have an incredibly difficult time arguing it's possible. You don't want to argue two distinct things, argue one thing (AGI).

Then ask what happens when you create a few million minds that can work on biology better than any human, using all the accumulated biology knowledge instead of a subset, learning it faster, working faster, making less mistakes, having better memory, tirelessly. The idea that you can make them even faster by giving them faster hardware, or the idea of a "bottleneck" based on waiting for real-life experimental results, is perhaps too complicated, but try to include them. Perhaps also ask what fraction of IRL biologists' time is spent doing intellectual tasks like reading/writing/learning/memorizing/thinking/arguing, or sleeping, instead of actively manipulating labware. Looking at a screen and following instructions is a job you can give to an intern.

That's one field. There are many fields. There's a lot of hardware like CPUs and GPUs that already exists, and we're constantly making more. Make them realize that talking about UBI or unemployment is kind of irrelevant, like talking about steel quality or how blacksmiths might make car parts instead of horseshoes is kind of irrelevant, or saying "for birds, the incentive to move faster to compete could affect feather length in unpredictable ways" when you have a jet fighter is kind of irrelevant.