While I have no doubt that Björn Nilsson’s answer worked when he posted it, it is failing for me with Postgres 9.4 and PG gem version 0.18.2. I have found the following to work after looking through the PG gem documentation:
pg = ActiveRecord::Base.connection
@type_map ||= PG::BasicTypeMapForResults.new(pg.raw_connection)
res = pg.execute("SELECT 'abc'::TEXT AS a, 123::INTEGER AS b, 1.23::FLOAT;")
res.type_map = @type_map
res[0]
# => {"a"=>"abc", "b"=>123, "float8"=>1.23}