I agree many of his predictions are bad but you should calm down with the gaslighting, it's ignorant of science history (the same was said of Aristotle, Semmelweis, Wright Brothers...) and is an impotent way of debating, especially in the context of science.
I grew up with Drexler as a sort of hero. It's amazing how rapidly nanotech went from the imminent thing to change all things to, 'huh - what's that supposed to be about?' Wonder if 20 years down the line we might look at AI similarly.
Anything that depends on such an advance, such as "building a biological simulator", is basically impossible. But even if it were possible, market forces still dictate whether a new technology is adopted or not. (see: the electric car vs the electrified train)
Come on, now - understanding natural language is pretty much the 0 yard line when it comes to AGI, the fact that it's not solved now doesn't tell us anything about how far away it is.
And I'd be on the lookout for massive advances in NLP over the next couple of years; there have been enormous leaps in 2018 alone when it comes to how good we are at understanding text (better applications of transformer models, high quality pre-trained base models, etc.), and now that there have been a few high-profile successes we're likely to see that field evolve just like computer vision has, even though I grant that it's a much harder problem in general.
In 2005, Kurzweil published The Singularity Is Near and predicted this would be the state of the world in the year 2030: "Nanobot technology will provide fully immersive, totally convincing virtual reality. Nanobots will take up positions in close physical proximity to every interneuronal connection coming from our senses. If we want to experience real reality, the nanobots just stay in position (in the capillaries) and do nothing. If we want to enter virtual reality, they suppress all of the inputs coming from our actual senses and replace them with the signals that would be appropriate for the virtual environment. Your brain experiences these signals as if they came from your physical body."
That is not happening by the year 2030. It is so starkly delusional that anyone who seriously affirms a belief that it will happen probably needs psychiatric help.
It is akin to Eric Drexler's loony visions back in the 1980s that nanobots would cure all diseases and continually restore our bodies to perfect health. We were supposed to all be immortal by now.
None of this is happening, probably not ever, and certainly not in the lifetime of any human being currently living. Kurzweil is going to die, Drexler is going to die, everybody is going to die. Adopting a pseudo-scientific religion to avoid facing mortality is kind of sad.