  Using as inspiration the well known chiral effective lagrangian describing
the interactions of pions at low energies, in these lectures we review the
quantization procedure of Einstein gravity in the spirit of effective field
theories. As has been emphasized by several authors, quantum corrections to
observables in gravity are, by naive power counting, very small. While some
quantities are not predictable (they require local counterterms of higher
dimensionality) others, non local, are. A notable example is the calculation of
quantum corrections to Newton's law. Albeit tiny these corrections are of
considerable theoretical importance, perhaps providing information on the
ultaviolet properties of gravity. We then try to search for a situation where
these non local corrections may be observable in a cosmological context in the
early universe. Having seen that gravity admits an effective treatment similar
to the one of pions, we pursue this analogy and propose a two-dimensional toy
model where a dynamical zwei-bein is generated from a theory without any metric
at all.
