Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1)

by Iain M. Banks

He looked for the Culture ship, then told himself not to be stupid; it was probably still several trillion kilometers away. That was how divorced from the human scale modern warfare had become. You could smash and destroy from unthinkable distances, obliterate planets from beyond their own system and provoke stars into novae from light-years off… and still have no good idea why you were really fighting.

It fascinated those Minds that such a puny and chaotic collection of mental faculties could by some sleight of neuron produce an answer to a problem which was as good as theirs. There was an explanation, of course, and it perhaps had something to do with patterns of cause and effect which even the almost god-like power of the Minds had difficulty trying to fathom; it also had quite a lot to do with sheer weight of numbers. There were in excess of eighteen trillion people in the Culture, just about every one of them well nourished, extensively educated and mentally alert, and only thirty or forty of them had this unusual ability to forecast and assess on a par with a well-informed Mind (of which there were already many hundreds of thousands). It was not impossible that this was pure luck; toss eighteen trillion coins in the air for a while and a few of them are going to keep landing the same side up for a long, long time.